Having a strategy pre-supposes a planned, orderly process with proper costing and budgeting, it involves consulting with the parties who are going to be using the intranet, allows for an efficient integration with existing systems and phasing-out of older ones, has long term benefits when the intranet needs to be scaled or made more secure, maintains control and quality in the hands of the designated department that "owns" it, and creates for the provision of feedback to monitor whether the "investment" is living up to the organization's expectations

Role of intranets

ntranets are generally used for four types of applications:

Communication and collaboration
send and receive e-mail, faxes, voice mail, and paging
discussion rooms and chat rooms
audio and video conferencing
virtual team meetings and project collaboration
online company discussions as events (e.g., IBM Jams)

Web publishing
develop and publish hyperlinked multi-media documents such as:
policy manuals
company newsletters
product catalogs
technical drawings
training material
telephone directories

Business operations and management
order processing
inventory control
production setup and control
management information systems

Intranet portal management
centrally administer all network functions including servers, clients, security, directories, and traffic
give users access to a variety of internal and external business tools/applications
integrate different technologies
conduct regular user research to identify and confirm strategy