Network Services
Network services are the foundation of a networked computing environment. Network services are installed on one or more servers to provide shared resources to client computers and thereby improve organization productivity.
Network services are of strategic importance to an organization’s success particularly in today’s global marketplace where businesses are becoming increasingly dispersed and mobile. More than ever, companies/schools are looking to networking technology to bring their employees, students customers, and business partners together—regardless of their location. Enterprise companies are increasingly turning to rich-media applications such as voice and video to increase worker productivity by improving collaboration, communication, and training, while reducing overall costs.
To take full advantage of these innovations, companies need to maximize their campus network to provide applications and services, and ensure a solid user experience through the corporate Intranet as Intranets are increasingly being used to deliver tools and applications, such as collaboration, sophisticated corporate directories, sales and CRM tools, project management, Learning Content management system, Portals etc. numbers of employees discussing key issues in an online forum could lead to new ideas developing and bringing to market many innovative or students could access course information or download assignments and course ware from a course website.
A state of the art intranet provides for
- Instant messaging
- Collaboration
- Content Management
- Business Portal
Advantages of intranets
Workforce productivity: Intranets could be the easiest way to boost employee productivity as it provides users with the right resources and helps to locate information faster and use applications relevant to their roles and responsibilities. Requiring mainly a web browser, users can access data held in any database the organization has made available, anytime and – subject to security provisions – from anywhere within the company site; thus increasing employees’ ability to perform their jobs faster, more accurately.
Save Time: With intranets, organizations can quickly make information available to employees and employees can link to relevant information at anytime.
Communication: Intranet serves as a powerful tool for communication within an organization, vertically and horizontally. Intranets are useful to communicate strategic initiatives that have a global reach throughout the organization. The type of information that can easily be conveyed is the purpose of the initiative and what the initiative is aiming to achieve, who is driving the initiative, results achieved to date, and who to speak to for more information. By providing this information on the intranet, staff have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the strategic focus of the organization.
Content Management: Web publishing allows ‘cumbersome’ corporate knowledge to be maintained and easily accessed throughout the company using hypermedia and Web technologies. Examples include: employee manuals, benefits documents, company policies, business standards, news-feeds, and even training, can be accessed using common Internet standards (Acrobat files, Flash files, CGI applications). Because each business unit can update the online copy of a document, the most recent version is always available to employees using the intranet.
Business operations and management: Intranets are also being used as a platform for developing and deploying applications to support business operations and decisions across the inter-networked enterprise.
Cost-effective: Users can view information and data via web-browser rather than maintaining physical documents such as procedure manuals, internal phone list and requisition forms.
Promote common corporate culture: Every user is viewing the same information within the Intranet.
Enhance Collaboration: With information easily accessible by all authorized users, teamwork is enabled.