Intranet Collaboration Software: it has simpler (yet powerful) alternatives for small and medium business

Intranet collaboration software is a system that employs technologies normally used on the Web (like PHP, HTML, Flash, web-browsers, etc), but inside of the corporate LAN. In other words, such an intranet collaboration application is like a web-site working in one office only (using local IT-facilities), and it is not exposed to the Internet access (or can be exposed just partially), but it can be reached and operated only by the company’s personnel that have credentials for doing this. Usually, intranet collaboration tools are popular because of a variety and diversity of services that they can potentially provide. There are a big number of different intranet collaboration software products and each one has its own profile and purpose, but usually they work as an office internal social network that delivers services such as:

• Corporate news feed and workers’ profiles (work-oriented personal pages or blogs);
• Suite for sharing working tasks and calendars;
• Tools for collaborating at documents (sharing and statusing documentation);
• Instruments for directing and controlling workflow, etc;

Very often intranet collaboration applications are open-sourced. This means that their functionality and interface can be modified (programmed) by users. In other words intranet collaboration open source capabilities are helpful to big companies with powerful IT-staffs including some qualified web-programmers, or companies that are ready to invest into designing and adjusting such a system to fit their business needs. 

Anyway, employment of such Intranet collaboration tools is connected to establishing database management services in your corporate IT-system along with maintaining their functioning by designing and adjusting web-based interface, regular database optimization, checking administrative issues and rights, resolving ongoing issues with database inquiries, etc. Therefore you can find some intranet collaboration free solutions (distributed freely), but requiring payments for modification and maintaining (if you fail to carry out these functions yourself).

Alternative to intranet collaboration software:

We can say that applying intranet collaboration software is not really advantageous for small and medium companies, as this practice is quite difficult (you need applying some advanced IT-wise efforts for this). If you want to try out something simpler in installation and maintaining, then you may examine VIP Task Manager that is a client-server program for task and time management. It can be deployed over your LAN just in a few minutes to let your people jump into working with it immediately after the installation (or at least after mild and easy adjusting to specifics of your workflow). This tool covers business needs in small project management, sharing tasks, documents & working calendars, managing timesheets and worksheets, etc.