I had a chance recently to read about and take a look at IntraOffice from IntranetSites. It’s not there yet – it’s still in alpha/beta form – but once it’s fully functional and rolled out I believe it will be a very valuable tool for managing your business practices.

 

 

 

 

IntraOffice Findings

 

 

 

 

When you finally get your mind around what IntranetSites is trying to do with IntraOffice, the all-encompassing vision of managing your business that is offered through their web-based service is pretty amazing. The breadth of what they are offering, with fully integrating document management, e-mail, customer support issues, bug tracking, and even scheduling and costing for project management is incredible.

 

 

 

 

IntraOffice offers seamlessly integrated e-mail, scheduling, costing, budgeting, and reporting capabilities. I was impressed seeing how a customer e-mail could be transformed into a task, and supplier inquiry (for quotes), as part of kicking off an order. At every point through your business process all the participants can pull up every document, or task, (with complete version history), allowing a full view of how everything has progressed from the very beginning. There are no information silos with one person winding up with crucial e-mails related to the project sitting in their in-box that others can’t see.

 

 

 

 

IntraOffice would be particularly powerful for handling work teams that are geographically dispersed. Everyone is kept up to date with the work, and managers have real-time status of progress.

 

 

 

 

Shortcomings

 

 

 

 

On the other hand, as much as this nascent product has going for it, it has a lot of rough edges right now. Its web UI is downright arcane, and it doesn’t have integration with Outlook, Salesforce, or any other system. This lack of 3rd party integration is particularly acute when it comes to financials, since this is one function that IntraOffice doesn’t offer. I know IntranetSites is thinking of remedying these deficiencies in the future, but these are real issues for anyone who would consider using it as a business tool today.

 

 

 

 

Of course, the very breadth of IntraOffice is also its Achilles heel. To really gain the benefits of this product you would need to adopt the whole package.

 

 

 

 

Need Testers

 

 

 

 

Still, IntraOffice is worth a look by adventurous managers. Their current offer for beta testers, who want to use their beta product to manage real processes and projects could be particularly interesting to those willing to brave through the current usability and inter-operability issues.

 

 

 

 

You can get more details about IntraOffice, and their beta program here:

 

 

 

 

http://dev.intranetsites.com/index.php?fuseaction=cPageGoTo.DisplayDoc&DocumentID=43605