Ask a Manager

And now a break to talk about a sponsor…

If your company intranet is little more than the place where documents go to die, you should check out Igloo.

Igloo is a totally different experience than the traditional intranet. It’s interactive, really easy to use, and highly customizable. You can use it to have a super simple intranet if that’s your thing, or you can have something quite complex; it’s impressively adaptable.

Igloo will pull together team calendars, project information, working documents, wikis (which you might use for SOPs, manuals, etc.), task management, document collaboration, and real-time updates from all your teams. You can also use it for secure file-sharing (like a secure version of Dropbox). And it even has a Twitter-like internal micro-blogging system, if you want to give people the chance to share quick thoughts across the company. And in particular, if you’re in HR or have the ear of HR, a modern intranet like Igloo can help centralize a hub of self-service information, corporate communications, and employee forums. It also looks good and works well on mobile phones, so you can actually use it when you’re on the road.

Plus, you can set it up and edit it with incredible ease. You won’t need to send every change through your I.T. department; even if you’re not very tech-savvy, you’ll probably be able to configure it yourself.

After I wrote about Igloo previously, I received an email from a reader who wrote that her company had been on the verge of signing a contract for intranet services with Sharepoint, which was going to be pricey. She suggested Igloo to the team that was working on the project, and they ended up “thrilled with the product.” Here’s the update she sent me afterwards: “I work closely with those folks (doing the implementation), and they are very happy with our decision to use Igloo. I can also vouch for the fact that our ‘all in’ cost saved us a good bit of money over Sharepoint. Also — I’m going to step on out on a limb and say that future support calls to Igloo, if needed, will be much less frustrating than they would be calling Sharepoint … Our company is quite small (40 or so employees) and the Igloo support team has, I’m told, bent over backwards to assist in our implementation.”

Speaking of price, it’s really affordable: It’s $12 per user per month, which is about a quarter of what you’d pay for Sharepoint. And it’s free if you have fewer than 10 users. You can learn more here.

Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Igloo. All thoughts and opinions are my own.