Intranet portal | HCL Digital Experience

An intranet portal site is designed to allow information to be quickly disseminated to employees, to make common internal business processes more efficient and to provide a sense of community within an organization.

The site provides access to:

  • News about what is happening within the organization.
  • Alerts that contain information that employees should be aware of and potentially action.
  • Forms for working with various internal processes such as leave, purchases, and travel.
  • A policies and procedures library with online versions of all policy and procedure documentation.
  • Organizational communities with collaborative features like blogs and forums.
  • A search system to enable employees to find content.

The intranet portal also has a personalized home page that is dynamically built by using a set of rules that retrieve content based on the current user's role, department, and location. By tagging the content, and then matching this content with the current user, only content that is appropriate for the current user is displayed.

A number of components are used together to make this intranet portal work:
  • HCL Portal is used to provide a platform for the integration of content and applications that form the intranet portal.
  • The overall theme and top-level navigation of the intranet is also managed by using HCL Portal.
  • The HCL Web Content Manager provides the micro-level layout of the content within the portal, and is also used to directly build the news, alerts, and communities content.
  • The forms are online applications that are built by using the Forms/Lists system, being pulled into the site by using the HCL Web Content Manager
  • Policies and Procedures are document libraries managed using IBM FileNet Content Manager.
  • A custom feed producer would be written to allow the Web Content Integrator to consume a feed from a FileNet Content Manager and HCL Web Content Manager would be used to present the documents in a website.
  • Personalization is used to associate content with users, dynamically generating the content that is displayed in the personalized home page
  • A third-party discussion system is used to deliver collaborative forums in the communities section of the site using a custom portlet.
  • HCL Portal search is used with the Web Content Manager categorization to provide both a simple text search and a more advanced category-based search.

The size of an intranet portal tends to scale with the size of the organization. A large organization has more information to disseminate, more business processes, more communities of employees. This means that the content and the user population tend to grow at the same rate.