Bitrix Announces the Ten Most Popular Intranet Collaboration Features for Improved Internal Efficiency

ALEXANDRIA, VA, January 28, 2011 (Press-News.org) Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces a survey of the top-10 most popular intranet collaboration benefits that allow organizations to improve internal efficiency and raise workforce productivity.

Based on analysis of 1.000+ real-life installations of Bitrix Intranet among small and medium-sized businesses and many years of implementing social-enabled intranet solutions, Bitrix has shortlisted the most popular collaboration features.
Rank Intranet Collaboration Feature
1 Employee availability and presence tracking
2 Instant messaging and video conferencing
3 Meetings / conference room management
4 Virtual workgroups
5 Shared documents
6 Workflow management
7 Routine processes automation
8 Information and expert discovery
9 Idea management and social networking
10 Task management

The top ten list reflects the most-used intranet collaboration features and correspond to the most popular adoption patterns. Intriguingly, the priority of listings doesn't match the wide-spread notion of the customer demand among SMBs. Indeed, task management, shared documents and content search are on the list but concede position to the seemingly less important features like presence tracking, instant messaging and meetings management. This is due to the fact that SMBs normally start the intranet implementation not with the most 'famous' features but rather those which are easy to adopt.

The survey confirms that SMBs are mainly interested in simple collaboration tools with the shortest adoption period. The organizations prefer step-by-step intranet adoption that starts from the most commonly used features and ends with heavy-weight functionality. In fact, this process may stretch over months depending on the organization's readiness, internal governance and c-level support.

Considering the growing popularity of the intranet technology, Bitrix predicts that in the next year this list may undergo a major shift. Many organizations will be one step ahead in the intranet adoption and proceed with implementing more comprehensive collaboration features. At the same time, we believe the market will be notable for greater awareness of the benefits of intranets, as vendors provide better guidance to speed up the technology adoption.

To name names, Bitrix anticipates business processes and records management, social CRM and e-learning to become shortlisted. The leading intranet vendors have already integrated these features to let organizations ease the burden of third-party software acquisition, implementation and maintenance. At the same time, these are crucial tools for effective business management.

"Over the past years, businesses have realized that intranets are no longer the luxury nor the exclusive domain of large enterprises. Affordable and easy-to-use solutions deliver a set of obvious advantages to small and medium-sized businesses by improving collaboration, simplifying communications and strengthening the team spirit with social networking features", said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc.