CIG is the BEST choice for setting up your company or organization's intranet. We have a solid record of building intranets for government, corporate and non-profit purposes, and we ALREADY have custom out-of-the-box intranets that we can setup for you for a fraction of the price of our competitors. Our Pegasus platform has hundreds of modules that can be instantly used in your organization. Hiring CIG to set up your intranet / online community is also a better choice than hiring full time staff members or contractors, because it is debatable that you will find staff as knowledgable and talented as we have at CIG in this area, and while you may trust your staff, you cannot guarantee that full time people making full time salaries really understand the many issues that are important to building a corporate intranet. Instead of spending a fortune on an internal staff to build an intranet, contact us about the CIG solution and how it can benefit you.

What Is An Intranet - A description of the term "intranet" and how it is used by a company, government or organization.

What Is An Intranet? (From www.learnthenet.com)    An intranet shares most of the characteristics of the Internet, but in at least one way, it's fundamentally different. And just as the Internet has had profound effect on how we communicate, intranets have transformed the business world as well. Both Fortune 500 corporations and small businesses have implemented this network infrastructure, improving productivity while reducing costs.    Just what is an intranet? Think of it as a mini-Internet designed to be used within the confines of a business, university or organization. What distinguishes an intranet from the freely accessible Internet, is that intranets are private. For Your Eyes Only    Traditionally, corporations relied on proprietary hardware and software systems to network its computers, a costly and time-consuming process made more difficult when offices are scattered around the world.

Even under the best of conditions, sharing information among different hardware platforms, file formats and software is not an easy task. By using off-the-shelf Internet technology, intranets solve this problem, making internal communication and collaboration much easier. Intranets use HTML to create documents and TCP/IP to transmit information across the network. Information is stored on one or more company servers and accessed by using a web browser, such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. This self-contained, miniature Internet can have all the same features--individual home pages, newsgroups, e-mail--but access is restricted to employees and contractors.    For employees who are already familiar with surfing the Web, learning how to navigate the company intranet requires little training. Intranet web pages have the same point-and-click interface. While it's useful for an intranet to connect to the Internet, it's certainly not essential. Even if they do connect externally, companies restrict access to their intranet from the Internet by building a firewall. With so much corporate information available on internal servers, security is essential.

Benefits of an Intranet

Below you will find a list of some of the benefits of an "intranet", which can help an organization or business in many ways.

In the old days, it was the file room that stored the information critical to the operation of the company. Almost always, that file room had a gatekeeper, a “historian” of sorts who kept everything organized, and who could direct you to find whatever you were looking for.

That system worked pretty well, unless:

• the gatekeeper was sick or retired
• the file that should be there wasn’t
• the organizational system didn’t make sense to anyone but the original architect
• no one made the time to keep the files updated and organized

Today CIG can offer a far superior system for storing, tracking, sharing, and updating company files so that the designated people have access to whatever they need any time. It’s our corporate intranet feature, which establishes a secure and private network exclusive only to your staff that becomes your company’s virtual information hub, cutting down on meetings, copies, and filing.

Better yet, CIG’s corporate intranet can also be used for company-wide communication, training, job postings, calendars, and even audio and video. Here are just a few of the ways you could use your corporate intranet:

Organization

• Sheduling for rooms and events (such as conference rooms)
• Interfacing the internal intranet and scheduling with the external website (communication with public)

File Storage

• office forms
• personnel files
• policies and procedures
• training manuals
• meeting notes
• expense reports
• accounting files
• annual and quarterly reports

Communication

• vendor information
• customer database
• professional contacts
• staff rosters and contact information
• bulletin boards and forums
• inter-departmental memos and announcements
• reservation forms for meeting rooms, equipment or vehicle check-out, etc.
• in-house e-mail
• articles, blogs, alerts, and news
• events calendar
• job openings
• help desk

Training

• online testing for employees as part of training
• self-directed training modules
• audio and video, as well as multi-media presentations