Simplify Communications and Connect Your Organization
Help your team and external partners find information easily and reduce inbox clutter with personalized web portal development services. At AdaptivEdge, we have years of experience leveraging Microsoft tools like SharePoint and Power Pages to build intranets and extranets that reflect your brand and connect your people.
Understanding Your Needs: Portal vs. Intranet vs. Extranet
A web portal is a website that integrates information, applications, and services from diverse sources into a single, unified interface. It serves as a centralized hub where users can access various types of content and tools, often customized to their specific needs and roles within an organization.
Microsoft 365 provides a robust platform for building internal-facing and external-facing web portals—also known as intranets and extranets:
- Intranet: An internal-facing portal that acts as a single, unified website for news, information, and sharing within an organization.
- Extranet: An external portal that is available to people outside the organization. Extranets are typically accessed by clients, partners, and vendors.
Intranets are typically made up of separate websites representing different departments, such as sales, marketing, engineering, human resources, information technology, etc. Office locations, projects, and company initiatives can also benefit from having a dedicated website. All of these separate sites are connected by a central intranet home page, branded according to your marketing guidelines and providing intelligent, easy-to-use navigation to help employees find the information they are looking for.
Featured Use Case: The HR Employee Portal
Human resources (HR) employee portals are one of the most popular use cases for intranets. They provide easy, 24/7 access to HR documents and resources, including:
- Benefits, payroll, and retirement content
- Company policies and procedures
- HR Team contact info
- Frequently Asked Questions
- HR support request ticketing
- Onboarding workflow automation
- Time tracking
- Expense reporting
- Training and development
- Employee recognition
- And more!
Employees gain independence over their own information and spend less time hunting for the HR resources they need, while HR teams can focus on more meaningful and strategic work, confident their people data is secure.
How Our Web Portal Development Services Work
Your AdaptivEdge consultant is here to help you navigate the process of planning and developing your web portal, including what information should be contained within each web portal, who the content authors, publishers, and consumers will be, and how to design your portal to positively reflect your brand.
Our Tools & Platforms for Designing Portals
SharePoint is our primary tool for building intranets. With over twenty years of proven success as an intranet platform, SharePoint offers out-of-the-box web parts and functionality, integrates with Microsoft Teams, and can extend its capabilities with third-party tools like BindTuning.
Power Pages is a newer product that provides comprehensive tools for developing extranet portals. While similar to SharePoint in that it provides no-code design tools, Power Pages uses external authentication mechanisms and Microsoft Dataverse for centralized data storage.
Our Consulting Process
- We work with key stakeholders to envision the final solution, recording key requirements in a Vision and Scope document.
- We use tools like card sorting and tree testing to help create optimal navigation and wireframe diagrams and page mockups to solidify page content and design.
- During the testing and validation process, we work with a sample of test users from different organizational roles and departments to gather feedback and make adjustments to the final design.
- Once the portal design is ready, we provide content and administrator training to departmental and functional stakeholders to ensure your team can publish new content and manage permissions independently.
- We assist with go-live communication and provide ongoing support to address issues and ensure adoption throughout the organization.
Meet Your Intranet & Extranet Consultant
Jade Goh is a SharePoint expert who is eager to help your company achieve greater connectivity and efficiency through personalized web portals.
Get to know Jade more on our team page: