What are the elements of an effective intranet?

Answer 1

Since I work for a company who's intranet is terrible at this point (basically I have now been hired to completely redo the entire thing so it works correctly), I can at least give you a couple of pointers, maybe not necessarily everything though.

#1 - Easy to find things. The things that people are going to use the most, should be as close to the forefront as possible. Also, navigation should be inherent. In other words, if most people at the company don't know that HR stands for Human Resources, then name the link Human Resources, not HR.
#2 - Easy to update/maintain. It needs to be simple enough that a) it doesn't wear you or whoever is updating it out and b) if possible, make it so that the relevant contact can make updates themselves (i.e. if HR wants job postings on there, if you can, give them a utility that lets them post the jobs themselves, instead of sending them to you to post)
#3 - Simply coded. Keep it as much HTML as possible, so that in the future, if anyone new has to make changes, they can do it easily, instead of having to learn Java or WebSphere or some application that not 100% of web programmers know.
#4 - Relevance, relevance, relevance! Keep out the riff-raff. If it's not something necessary for employees to know, i.e. Jim the handy-dandy IT guy is having a birthday party this weekend <-- not relevant. Company's stock up 2 points <-- relevant.

Technology-wise, you'll need a server (preferably in-house) that can run database applications. You'll likely want to use a database for at least some things, such as contacts (because when you have 50,300 employees, Word documents are extremely inefficient), or job openings, and so on. But you won't necessarily need to use one for everything. If you have technical specifics that you're using/looking for, post them and I'll tell you what you can do with them.

Hope this at least helps a little.

Answer 2

A minimal intranet could be made with a server running a web server software (Apache, IIS or other) and a client connected via TCP/IP and running a web browser.