Headless CMS Use Case: Intranet

Intranets are still thought of as the heartbeat of internal enterprise communications. The digital bulletin board is where all employees go to find the latest corporate news, crucial company policies, and training information and collaborate on ongoing projects.

Unfortunately, it’s challenging for the modern intranet to provide exactly what employees need. Modern solutions have moved to the cloud and offer a more dynamic experience compared to the static repositories of the past. However, the current intranet experience is largely content-driven, and employees rely on a variety of third-party tools, from Slack and GDrive to Trello. 

Businesses need the flexibility to create a dynamic content experience that pulls employees in and improves productivity without forcing them to discard their favorite tools. The answer? A headless CMS built for enterprises.

In this blog, we’ll explain how a headless CMS can provide an intranet that employees love. 

Traditional Intranet Limitations

For most employees, the current intranet is a place to consume news and information. In fact, according to the SWOOP Analytics report on Microsoft SharePoint Intranets, employees spend 16 minutes a day reading the company intranet. Also, 60% of the content consumed on the intranet is news. 

Given the content-focused nature of the modern intranet, the traditional solutions pose some limitations. 

Complex Content Management

Intranets don’t offer the user-friendly interface internal communication teams need to create content. Despite including some variation of AI and other modern technologies, most intranets aren’t built to create engaging content experiences. Employees can consume content, but the experience isn’t necessarily going to be engaging. 

Limited Omnichannel Options

The majority of intranet content is consumed via desktop. According to the SWOOP Analytics report, a whopping 99% of employees access their intranet via desktop. Although several intranets offer mobile options, the experience is typically clunky and disjointed from the desktop experience, making it unappealing for employees. 

Lack of Integration with Other Tools

The intranet is meant to be the central piece of technology in an organization, but it is far from the only tool that employees use. Unfortunately, integrating traditional intranet solutions with enterprise HR software and project management tools can be cumbersome. 

Limited Search Functionality

Companies want to augment their search functionality and offer chatbots to support it with AI. This can allow them to tailor responses to training questions based on who is asking. However, modern intranets don’t offer this type of functionality built in, and instead require you to integrate a 3rd party search engine that can be difficult and expensive. 

Expensive Scalability 

Over time, most organizations hope to experience a certain level of growth. This means that the intranet (like other solutions in the tech stack) will need to scale with them. However, traditional intranet tools can be expensive to scale and support an increased user load, more data, and remote and hybrid working environments.  

Why Use a Headless CMS to Build Your Intranet

Aside from offering solutions to many of the limitations of the traditional intranet, a headless CMS allows businesses to enhance the intranet experience in new ways. 

One Stop For All Content Needs

Most intranets are used to store evergreen content such as policies and training materials or publish news updates. While many modern intranets offer some valuable features, a headless CMS provides another solution that enables organizations to satisfy their content management and intranet needs in one. 

Improved Search and Generative AI Experiences

Headless CMSs with powerful search capabilities can help create search-driven employee experiences, and embedded search engines can be used to store embeddings for AI-based chatbots to provide personalized answers to employee questions. 

Improved Flexibility

Headless CMSs are flexible and able to adapt to different company requirements. With the freedom to use any frontend framework, developers can build more dynamic intranets that match the brand rather than be restricted by the pre-built templates of traditional intranet software. 

Personalized Omnichannel Experiences

Internal communication ideally occurs through several channels, including digital signage, newsletters, live events, and digital magazines. With a headless CMS, organizations can deliver content to any channel. 

However, unlike a traditional intranet tool, the experience is seamless and engaging no matter the channel where content is published. This enables companies to create truly personalized omnichannel experiences that keep employees engaged. 

Companies can even use a headless CMS to create personalized experiences for different audiences and customize content shared on the intranet based on an employee’s role or department. Additionally, teams can introduce real-time updates for safety updates, company-wide alerts, and other news to avoid interpreting employee productivity. 

Streamlined Content Management

Modern intranets are increasingly focused on content but lack the content management capabilities communications teams need. A headless CMS offers streamlined content management, a functional interface, and workflows to help teams publish content faster and improve the employee experience. 

Additionally, businesses can create content once and publish it to other channels without suffering a dip in the overall digital experience. This reduces content duplication efforts while still supporting an omnichannel experience for employees. 

Easier Integration with Other Systems

The company intranet isn’t the only tool that employees will use. Whether they continue to use Microsoft Teams or Slack or need access to the CRM, ERP, or other solution, a headless CMS can easily integrate with these other tools to provide a unified experience across the enterprise.

Catering to Multilingual or Distributed Teams

Global organizations with distributed teams need to translate content into different languages and may even need region-specific variations. A headless CMS can cater to these teams, allowing businesses to localize content and distribute it accordingly. 

Smoother Scalability

A headless CMS offers better scalability at a lower cost than traditional intranet software, allowing organizations to meet increased employee demand for content or interactive experiences. 

Transform the Intranet Experience with CrafterCMS

Creating and sustaining an effective intranet or employee portal goes beyond simply serving as a content repository. It demands a dynamic, secure, personalized, and engaging platform designed to meet the diverse needs of your workforce.

CrafterCMS is an enterprise-grade headless CMS designed to address the unique challenges of managing intranets and employee portals. It provides a flexible, secure platform that delivers engaging content experiences and enhances communication, collaboration, and productivity across the organization.

Best-in-Class Content Management

The modern intranet is content-based, and CrafterCMS offers a user-friendly interface for creating, updating, and publishing content to any channel. With Crafter Studio, users can rely on drag-and-drop functionality, WYSIWYG content editing, and multi-channel preview to create the best digital experience for their employees. 

Omnichannel Content Delivery

CrafterCMS can deliver content to any channel using APIs. This headless architecture allows organizations to provide mobile access to the intranet to their employees and on several other channels including digital signage in office lobbies. 

Built-in Search Engine

CrafterCMS leverages OpenSearch for a built-in search engine. And it does so for both the content authoring system (for authors to easily find content) and the content delivery system (for developers to build modern search experiences for end users) in its decoupled system architecture. OpenSearch also supports a vector store for generative AI embeddings. This allows CrafterCMS to leverage a high-performance, customizable search solution with artificial intelligence capabilities to enhance the employee experience and make it easier to find pertinent information.

Improved Collaboration

CrafterCMS integrates with some of the most common collaboration tools companies use today, including Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Workspace. This enables employees to collaborate on projects, share files, and communicate in real-time directly from the intranet.

Enterprise Security

CrafterCMS provides robust security features, including role-based access control, end-to-end encryption, audit trails, and compliance to protect sensitive information and ensure compliance with industry regulations.

Smooth Integration

CrafterCMS offers an API-first architecture, allowing seamless integration with a wide range of enterprise systems, including HR platforms, CRM tools, and project management systems.

Scalability

CrafterCMS’s cloud-native architecture ensures that your intranet and employee portal can scale effortlessly to accommodate increased content, user activity, and new features. Whether your organization is growing or expanding globally, CrafterCMS can handle the load.

How CrafterCMS Powers a Global Intranet at Marriott

Global hospitality leader Marriott International uses CrafterCMS to power its extranet (an intranet that includes authorized access for vendors, suppliers, and other business partners). It gives employees and franchisee operators secure access to critical brand content, policies, and data. 

Read our case study and learn why Marriott chose CrafterCMS to cater to their intranet needs.