Intranet CMS

Use this template to select the best employee intranet CMS for your business and jumpstart your team's processes and documentation.

Must-have templates for your intranet CMS:

• Employee Handbook
• Internal Process and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Template
• Internal Team Update Template - See how Noom shares information virtually with the whole team.
• Remote Work Resources Template - We curated the best remote work templates to support your team.
• Plus get our 195+ Free Intranet Templates.

Choosing an intranet CMS? Top 11 must-haves for every team

✅Security

With a hacking attempt occurring every 39 seconds the security of your company’s intranet is critical.

Guru is built from the ground up with security as a priority. Security features in Guru include:

• SOC 2 Type 2
• PCI-compliant
• SAML-based SSO
• IP whitelisting
• Data encryption in transit and at rest
• GDPR-ready

To make sure that you’re getting the best security, Guru hires an independent firm annually to conduct a security audit that covers the confidentiality and privacy trust services criteria in addition to the common criteria.

✅Ease of use

Adoption rate is a metric of success for an intranet CMS. Does it offer a seamless user experience that requires minimal training? Is it easy for employees to create content and engage with the platform?

Employees are likely to sidestep the portal if they find it hard to use, which defeats the purpose of setting it up.

The intranet must be intuitive to allow anyone from new hires to managers to navigate the system easily.

When your internal applications are easy to use, it shifts some of the burden of responsibility from IT and saves time teaching employees how to use your intranet.

✅Compatibility with your devices

In today’s age of remote work, employees are not bound to their PCs anymore. In fact, 60% of employees use mobile apps for work-related tasks. Intranets should be device compatible with tablets, phones, and desktops.

Guru offers mobile apps that are available for iOS and Android devices. You can even log in with a username and password or SSO if your team uses it.

✅Communication and social engagement

It’s easier for employees to feel engaged when your intranet includes features to like, share, rate, and comment on content.

Where traditional intranets went extinct because they became dumping grounds for outdated information, modern intranets engage with social tools that include instant messaging, video conferencing, surveys, discussions, and more.

It should be easy for employees to create content, connect with colleagues outside of their department, collaborate on intra-departmental projects and join interest groups within the organization.

For example, Guru’s Slackbot allows you to capture knowledge created within your team’s Slack conversations every day. Learn more about Guru’s Slack integration.

With Guru’s Microsoft Teams integration, your team can access and share verified information while chatting and collaborating with other teammates. Learn more about Guru’s Microsoft Teams integration.

Employees can also comment on Guru Cards if they have more questions and Card authors can reply to start a threaded conversation in the comment section to make it easy to see what conversations are happening

✅Robust search option

An intuitive search feature makes it easy and faster to find information. The best CMS saves time, reduces frustration, boosts productivity, and helps employees find the right results. Your preferred CMS should also be searchable across results indexed on multiple file-formats and apps within your organization. Learn how to use Guru to search for information across integrated apps.

✅Integration with remote working apps

According to findstack, 16% of all global companies are 100% remote and 77% of remote workers are more productive when working from home.

While remote work has been on the rise for years, the pandemic forced most companies to join the trend. If employees are to remain productive, it’s important that your intranet is remote-friendly and integrates with other apps.

Guru integrates with the tools you already use in your workflow. Some of the remote apps that Guru integrates with include:

• Gmail
• Intercom
• Salesforce
• Zendesk
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Zapier
• Workato
• Okta

✅Version control, read acknowledgment, and permission

Nothing is worse than finding out you’ve deleted an important business document. When your CMS hosts sensitive documents such as process documentation, compliance documents, or legal documents, there are even bigger repercussions.

Controlling who can edit or approve content reduces the risk of unauthorized editing and ensures the content you publish is the single source of truth.

Guru’s verification engine ensures that experts within your organization always provide your teams with trustworthy content that is current, accurate, and consistent.

While anyone can create Cards in Guru, they need to select a Verifier to verify the Card’s accuracy and choose the frequency to confirm the Card’s accuracy.

When a Card is verified, you’ll see the trust indicator in the top left of every Card.

✅Analytics to improve decision making

Analytics gives you insight into how your team is using the intranet, what’s working and what needs to be improved. Data from your analytics dashboard may include the following:

• Content that generates the most engagement
• Outdated content
• Unsatisfied search intent (content gaps to close)
• The most active users on the intranet
• The least active uses on the intranet (they may need support or training)

These insights can improve your decision-making and help your intranet return more personalized suggestions. The data also comes in handy when it’s time to justify the investment in the intranet CMS.

If your team uses Guru’s AI Suggest, you can view and access usage metrics on the Performance Analytics dashboard.

Performance Analytics shows how your team uses AI-suggested Cards. Analytics also reveals which apps employees are using suggested Cards and which content is most helpful. Other metrics include:

• The total volume of interactions across all tools where AI Suggest is activated
• Guru usage by channel to understand which tools your team uses the most
• Guru usage over support conversations
• Most impactful content across each tool

✅Multi-content format

We live in a visuals-heavy world. Text-only content isn’t enough anymore. According to Venngage, visuals increase interest in a piece of content by up to 80%.

Your intranet should be able to embed video, audio, polls, infographics, social media posts, and other content formats, and employees should be able to create content without coding experience.

✅Feedback survey feature

Employees who feel heard in their role are nearly 5 times more likely to perform to the best of their abilities. Interestingly, HR professionals who have implemented a feedback feature recorded a 24% performance improvement across the workforce.

Almost all employees at every level prefer to receive feedback on a regular basis because it helps them build confidence, feel valued, and less stressed out.

As best practices for performing job roles evolve, continuous feedback ensures that information flows from the top-down and employees are always using best-in-industry techniques to perform job functions.

A few benefits of choosing an intranet CMS that includes feedback and survey integrations include the ability to:

• Collect data to understand employee motivation
• Uncover issues that should be dealt with immediately
• Give employees a voice to be heard and to feel like their opinions are important to management
• Encourage open-work culture, knowledge sharing, and collaboration between team members

✅Targeting

Your employees are overloaded with information. From news notifications to social media feeds, and tons of emails waiting in their inboxes when they wake up, it gets overwhelming quickly.

It’s important to choose an intranet CMS that allows you to send targeted content to your team. Employees should have personalized activity feeds that only shows information that’s relevant to them. Content should be targeted based on the department and current projects the employee is working on.

Targeting also improves engagement since employees are only seeing content they find interesting. Targeting options to look for include

• Location
• Job roles
• Personal interest

For example, if you publish content for your marketing team, the rest of your employees don’t need to get notified. This feature creates a clutter-free experience for users.