Intranets are specialized forms of Content Management driven websites where all or part of the content is only available to a designated group of people such as a company's employees or partners. An Intranet is often mentioned as the company's internal website. It is quite possible that a company's public website contains an Intranet within itself.

Corporate Intranet

In a generic Intranet, a smaller group of managers and administrators maintain and publish content for a larger audience of registered users. This setup is modeled after the traditional corporate environment where the command chain goes from the top to bottom through several layers of management and power hierarchy in place. In this case the flow of information is often controlled and restricted among the registered users.

Social Media Intranet

A newer generation of companies and organizations who work in a more flat team structure, are more in favor of Social Media Intranets, where registered members can freely communicate with each other and collaborate on producing and sharing the content. A Social Media Intranet, enables members to sign-in and join their virtual teams from any physical locations with an Internet access.

Summary of Main Features

The following are some of the main features that make the development of the web-based Intranets possible. 

A Secured and Private Network

Within an Intranet, users have to register and sign-in first in order to access the private areas of the website.

Administration User Manager

On a private network, whether there are only a handful of users or hundreds of thousands of them, the Administrators can view and maintain all the accounts using the User Manager in the administration back-end.

User Permissions & Roles

The Access Control List (ACL) allows Administrators to assign different roles to different users within the private network.

Multiple Access Levels for the Articles

Articles, Menu Items, and all the user interface widgets on the private website can be assigned to different access levels. For example: Public, Registered, and Special (administrators)

Do more with an Intranet

An Intranet is sometimes combined with other types of social media applications such as Blogs , Wikis , and Discussion Forums .

The next evolutionary stage for an organization's private network and Intranet is to become a Social Networking Intranet, which is essentially a private Social Networking website where users have the privileges to communicate with each other, share information, and collaborate on projects.