While the paperless office is still far from being a reality, intranets have and continue to reduce many a headache in corporate corridors. What more can you expect from your intranet in the future?

Expressed in the simplest terms, a corporate intranet is a walled business environment thriving on interactivity and communication, rather like your workplace. The only difference is that this environment exists in cyberspace. Experts contend that many businesses started taking a fancy to intranets around a decade ago.

Intranets put together with extranets, find application in wide variety of tasks, right from tracking deliveries to administration, and from sales to payroll monitoring. You can customize your internet system according to the end users needs and also your own budget.

So what does the future hold for intranets? It will going to become a Virtual Desk for an employee, a place where he can access business applications for transacting business and use online tools for collaborating with suppliers, customers, knowledge communities, colleagues etc. It will also facilitate usage of Internet and video phones and conferencing tools for communications and meetings.

Today, intranets have grown rapidly and become much more than a network of computers strung together in Cyberspace. But as the intranets grow, so do your responsibilities towards it. To add with employee blogs and wikis have made their way into intranets. The size of your organizations really doesn’t matter. Correct and adequate communications, site improvements, and meaningful incentives that encourage employee involvement, do.