What is an intranet

Intranert is a central informational hub of the company. The single source of truth about who-does-what, where-to-find, how-to and any other useful info a company could provide to its employees to make their working life easier. Intranets encourage communication within an organization. 

Why prefer Confluence as an intranet tool

There are many reasons, but I'll mention main of them:

• an ability to place knowledge management tools (docs, policies, learning management solution, etc) and intranet (news, org chart, news, polls, etc) at one place  
• (following previous) less license cost
• easier onboarding for newcomers as they don't need to spend hours searching the info
• built in integration with Jira Service Management, Jira Software and other Atlassian products, which opens many great scenarios of operational work automation

How to

This article is about Confluence Data Center since the possibility to build attractive Intranet portal is quite limited on Cloud nowadays.

We strongly (and sincerely!) recommend using Linchpin Intranet Suite created by our partner Seibert Media to make your Confluence the greatest place to inspire knowledge sharing and communication.

I'm not going to describe the power of this addon, you could go through Seibert Media's promo materials on your own, but I'll provide some useful tips about how to build an Inranet which will be the most useful and popular site at your company.

Start with intranet structure design. It might be like:

• Headquarters space (might be separated for different locations, for example, provide info in German in Germany and in English in the UK):
  • Company history
  • Org structure
  • Policies and regulations (could be integrated with learning management addon to improve annual trainings tracking!)
  • FAQ
  • Corporate library
  • Start page (news, polls, birthdays, microblogs)
• Unit space
  • Who we are
  • Useful docs
  • Business processes description
• Project space
  • Project chapter
  • Design/Architecture
  • Tech docs
  • User docs
• Product space
  • User docs
  • Customer support instructions
  • Tech doc
  • Roadmap

Then you'll have to train all the employees the basic concepts about knowledge sharing, find evangelists and keep helping them for 3-6 month. In the end you'll see a magic - everyone knows where to find/place/change any info which should be used by others.

BTW, don't forget to design a content lifecycle management - there is nothing more annoying than an outdated info in your knowledgebase!