Intranet: what a small company actually needs it to do

An intranet is the internal site where a company keeps the things everyone needs and nobody should have to ask for: policies, forms, who does what, how to book leave, where the brand assets are, what happened this month. It is judged by one question — when someone needs an answer, do they go there first, or do they message a colleague.

That question is answered by maintenance rather than by features. An intranet with an out-of-date holiday policy and a staff list containing two people who left is not a slightly stale intranet; it is a site nobody trusts, and trust is the whole product.

What belongs on an intranet

• The people directory: who works here, what they do, how to reach them.
• Policies and the forms attached to them, current and dated.
• How-to content for the things everyone does occasionally: expenses, leave, equipment, travel.
• The document library, or a clear pointer to wherever documents actually live.
• Announcements, with a date and an author.
• Onboarding material for new joiners, which is the audience that uses an intranet most.

What does not belong: anything that duplicates a system of record. An intranet page listing project statuses will drift from the project tool within a fortnight. Link to the source instead — the intranet is an index, not a copy.

Why intranets go stale

1. Give every page a named owner and a review date, visible on the page.
2. Make the owner someone who uses the content, not the person who built the site.
3. Delete rather than archive: an intranet with two versions of a policy is worse than one with none.
4. Review the top twenty pages quarterly and ignore the long tail — usage is heavily concentrated.
5. Watch the search log; it is a free list of what people cannot find.

The most common intranet failure is publishing everything at launch and reviewing nothing afterwards. A site with thirty maintained pages beats one with three hundred where a third are wrong — and the second kind teaches people to ask a colleague instead, permanently. Pages that create obligations should go through the document approval workflow rather than being edited in place.

Build or buy, honestly

Large organisations buy intranet platforms with governance, workflow and integrations, and the cost is justified by scale. A company of twenty people needs a site, a directory, a document library and someone who owns it — and usually already has the last of those as a part-time role.

Ettex Sites builds that shape: an internal site with pages, ownership and review dates, next to the document library and the team directory. It is not an enterprise intranet platform and does not pretend to be — where the requirement is workflow-heavy governance across thousands of employees, that is a different category of product and worth paying for.