At the end of June, the 3rd Intranet Portal Exhibition INTRANET BENCHMARKING was held at the Best Intranet Russia 2014 conference, in which the internal Mail.Ru Group website took part. Following the conference, I would like to formulate the main trends in the development of corporate sites, describe their main features and tell about our portal. At the beginning of the article a brief description of the exhibition is presented, and the rest of the article is devoted to the description of a modern intranet portal with examples from the Mail.Ru Group intranet.

The intranets presented at the exhibition are either a portal or a full-fledged social network with the unification of employees into groups, sending messages and writing news through statuses. I would also like to note that the majority of the companies represented develop an outsourcing site and only a few keep on staff a separate team of developers specifically allocated for intranet.

According to the nominations announced in the competition of intranet portals, the internal site must answer 3 main questions:

1. How does the intranet implement corporate principles?
2. How does intranet help improve communications in a company?
3. How does the intranet automate the functions of the HR department?

Dedicated in the development of corporate portals trends:

1. The need for a mobile version / mobile application.
2. The latest news on the main page of the portal.
3. Dialogue with top managers - many companies in one form or another connect top managers to activities on the intranet.

1. How it all began

Let's remember what the intranet looked like in companies 10-15 years ago. Then shared folders were distributed in which files with phones, lists of employees, forms of documents and other information lay. Few people could transfer internal documents to the intranet, especially because of the complexity - then the intranet technologies were a wonder. Even the largest corporations represented this sphere in a slightly different form. The development proceeded along the path of creating a Windows-domain, so that accounts are stored on the company's server, sharing documents, again on those shared folders, corporate mail. Technologically, the development went towards the use of specialized applications (for example, Outlook) running on user computers.
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A little later, the web begins to tightly enter into the internal work of companies. Internal webmails appear, highlighted by task schedulers. Creation of intranet portals begins, as a rule, with one or several of the following blocks:

• phone book of company employees and departments;
• page with blank documents;
• corporate news;
• common documents (orders, regulations).

Then, as necessary, the intranet begins to acquire new functions; employees appear in the company who are solely responsible for this part of corporate life. The larger the company, the more functions it has intranet portal. It accelerates the development of corporate culture, facilitates the adaptation of new employees, saves time on finding information about the internal structure of the company, facilitates communication.



The internal site for Mail.Ru Group employees appeared in 2000, and a year later it was rewritten, with the future CEO of Mail.Ru Group Dmitry Grishin participating in the development. Initially, it was a primitive task tracker with employee contact information, but over time it grew to a large portal. Now it has integration with other corporate systems (for example, personnel accounting) and office support systems (the ability to call work and mobile numbers of employees directly from the intranet, the schedule for parking for the current day, the menu in the restaurant for today and others).

2. Functions of a modern corporate portal

Intranet is a great tool that allows you to solve a fairly large range of tasks. Depending on the role of the employee in the company, everyone finds their place in it and tries to automate their work. For most employees, this is basically getting information about the life of the company, life in the office, as well as communication (announcements, blogs, discussion of ideas). For the personnel department, this includes maintaining employee cards, automating the filing of applications for certificates, vacations, maintaining sections with documents, vacancies, and much more. For the administrative department, this is, for example, automation of ordering passes, booking meeting rooms.

A corporate portal is currently, as a rule, not an independent site, but a combination of several products — a task tracker, a document management system, an ERP system, and others. Therefore, it is very important that it can interact with other systems by providing its own API. Integration with SAP, Jira, an office access control system, a vacancy section on the corporate website corp.mail.ru is implemented on our portal.

Below we provide a description of the collective image of the modern corporate intranet with examples from the Mail.Ru Group portal with the hope that it will tell someone the development directions of the intranet portals, and also allow us to discuss existing ideas.

3. The collective image of the modern corporate portal

From the point of view of the roles of users on an intranet, one can identify ordinary employees and employees with extended rights (moderators, administrators and heads of departments). Let's look at the intranet sections in terms of these roles.

3.1 Intranet sections for all employees

Globally, all sections can be divided into 3 parts: information sections, sections for internal communications and corporate sections that implement important business tasks. Consider each type separately.

3.1.1 Information sections

The most important portal page is the main page. This is the first thing that every employee sees when entering the site, so each company places the most important and relevant information here. Most often, this is the latest news, announcements, birthdays of employees, a block with the latest events in other sections, polls. The main page of our portal now looks like this:



The next information section, which is absolutely for everyone, is the employee card. It may contain only the name and surname of the employee with contact details, and may be a large questionnaire with information about where the employee sits in the office, noting that the person is on vacation (or will soon be on vacation), personal interests, links to profiles on various sites . The employee profile now looks like this:



Another quite obvious section, which probably many people have, is the “Projects” section, which contains information about the projects and products of the company with contacts of managers and responsible employees. Here you can see who exactly is involved in the project, read the news, write a message to the manager about the idea for the project or report a bug.

Each company comes up with other information sections to suit its needs. For example, we have one of the popular sections is "Team News". It publishes greetings from new employees, messages about job changes, congratulations on probation, goodbyes and parting words from employees who have decided to leave the company.

An interesting section, but not yet implemented on our portal, is the section "Quality of Life". It is intended primarily for employees whose company is the first place of work. The purpose of this section is to increase employee awareness in some areas: travel, taxes (tax refund), finances, health, family, etc.

3.1.2 Communications

The sections on communications on the portal are more or less settled and look about the same for everyone. As a rule, this is the “Ideas” section, where an employee can suggest his / her idea of ​​improving the company's product, life in the office, complain about a problem. It is important to ensure timely response to ideas. For example, we do it this way. When adding an idea, the required field is “category”. Each category has one or several responsible persons - these are representatives of divisions who can take the idea “into work” or “reject” by writing an official response.

In total, there are 5 statuses for ideas in which it can be: “New”, “Under Review”, “In Work”, “Implemented”, “Rejected”. For each idea, you can vote "for" or "against", and, if the employee has not yet decided on the choice, he does not see the current tally of votes. But despite this, he may re-vote later if his opinion has changed.

An employee can subscribe to the section and receive notifications about new ideas, or you can subscribe to a specific idea and receive notifications about status transitions and new comments to the idea (in order not to be distracted from working to check for new messages, comments can appear a month after publish ideas). The page is sorted by rating, date of update and number of comments.

The “Blogs” sections are quite well-established, where employees can share their experience, ask for advice, “Interest groups”, where employees can organize into groups (sports, learning foreign languages, travel, etc.), “Mailing lists”, which allow you to manage communication channels. Each employee chooses what interests him and subscribes to relevant topics (both working and entertaining).

Usually quite popular with employees section "Ads". Most often it is buying / selling, renting / renting apartments. For colleagues, they usually sell everything cheaper or even give it away just like that. The head of the project Welcome Mail.Ru once sold a coffee maker donated to her and transferred the money to urgent Mail.Ru Dobra projects, and another arranged an auction with an initial rate of 0 rubles for various computer hardware.

Another, which appeared relatively recently, but has already managed to settle with many on the intranet, is the section “Thank you” service: each employee can say an electronic thank you to his colleague, write a message or attach a picture. On average, Mail.Ru Group employees send each other 30 thanks.



And, of course, communication includes commenting on objects on the site (news, announcements, ideas, some pages).

3.1.3 Corporate sections

Corporate sections, as already mentioned, solve the company's business problems. Therefore, it is impossible to make a general list for everyone - everyone decides what is necessary for him at the moment. For example, it can be a quick search for people in the office, which is implemented using a convenient map of offices. This is especially true if the office is large and not divided into offices (openspace).



This also includes the “Company Structure” section, which allows you to see the organizational structure, how many people work in each department, and quickly find the contact of the right person.

Let's take as an example some more sections that are running on the Mail.Ru Group intranet:

• The training section, where an employee can find information about available seminars and trainings, sign up for a specific event. Also in this section can be placed calendar of conferences, where you can go on a business trip.
• Feedback. We have developed our own feedback platform to make this process as convenient as possible for our colleagues. The employee can get acquainted with the objectives of the event, fill out the necessary questionnaires, see and edit the development goals for the future.
• Important contacts are telephone and technical support mail, secretary phones, contacts of the heads of the personnel department and the administrative department.

3.2 Pages for administrators / moderators / managers

In addition to regular users of the portal, there should be employees who have extended access. Each intranet has sections that require moderation, and responsible moderators who follow the published materials (news, announcements, profile photos). The system of assignment of rights is very widely used on our portal, which allows you to conveniently and quickly moderate and update information in various sections of the site.

Access rights are granted not only to edit information, but to certain services. For example, to the preparation of business reports.

4. Services on the intranet portal

Talking about the intranet portal, it is impossible not to mention the individual services that simplify employees some tasks or speed up their work. This is primarily a search for employees and for the portal as a whole. A feature of the search on our portal is a large list of fields by which you can filter. Thus, it is possible to find all men with an Android phone, who get to work by car and know English. If, of course, they filled out this information in their profile. :)

Popular intranet services include reservation of meeting rooms. We also implemented a reservation of sports equipment (bicycles and scooters) and a record to the doctor.

Another recently appeared and managed to become a popular section is the service "Badges". A list of events for which the employee can get the icon. We identified the following activities: technopark participant, habravautor, participant of the Warface tournament, creating an idea that scored 100, 250 or 500 votes, writing 100 comments on the portal, writing a comment that received 50 pluses and others.



To actively used services include "polls". Each employee can create a survey, which, if desired, can be limited to a certain group of people (by department, city, group, project). In this case, polls can be attached to news, announcements, blog entries, etc. Especially important polls are published on the main page.

Some intranets currently integrate with office telephony, which provides employees with the opportunity to call work and mobile phones of colleagues directly from the site. Also the service associated with phones is sending SMS to an employee from his profile page. It should be noted that one of the trends in the development of portals is the creation of a mobile site application so that each employee has access to information on the portal from a mobile device.

Since most of the time employees spend at the computer and actively use the portal, this makes it possible to use it not only for work purposes, but also sometimes for entertainment. In particular, you can arrange various interesting promotions on holidays or just like that. This allows you to attract more participants, as opposed to offline events, as everyone can take part at a convenient time for him and come back later if there are any important things at the moment.

The most memorable events we had were the following:

• Valentines for Valentines Day and a huge heart made up of photos of employees
• On March 8, a service was launched on the intranet that made it possible to present a virtual bouquet to any employee and write greeting words.
• Mail.Ru Group Award for the new year. The staff of the personnel department came up with 13 nominations and announced a competition, which was held in three stages: first nominating, then voting for the employees who got the most votes, and then announcing the results with prizes.

The following services are also implemented on our portal for obtaining information about the office:

• Information about the workload of parking.
• Broadcast video cameras in the office. There are two cameras available - a gym and a restaurant.
• The dining room menu. Implemented a section in which the menu is laid out from the dining room for every day, while you can collect your lunch and see the number of calories, price. It is also possible to evaluate each dish on a 5-point scale.

5. Conclusion

Summing up the article, I would like to note that at present companies are trying to use corporate systems to solve not only administrative issues and simplify communications within the company. Corporate sites come to a new level when they are fully integrated into the life of employees. And no one is surprised that by clicking on the phone number on a page in the browser, the work phone is activated and dials the number of a colleague. The next step for development is the development of a convenient mobile application, which will be configured to access not only from the office network. Corporate online environment allows the company to become more flexible and grow faster.

The success of employee interaction in corporate IT systems depends on the involvement of all management levels, so it is important that top managers also be participants in such interaction. An open company, where an employee can directly appeal to top management, is much more attractive as an employer, besides the possibility of communication allows you to convey the position of top management to all employees (for example, about the development priorities of the company, about key decisions made). people confidence in potential career growth. This concept should be reflected in the corporate portals of the future.

The Mail.Ru Group intranet is written in Python / Django using MySQL DBMS. Centrifuge is also actively used (an open source Python message broker written by one of our employees). We deliberately did not include here the technical aspects of implementation, but if you are interested in learning about certain sections of the site in more detail, write about it in the comments.