Software maker Mindbridge.com Tuesday offered its intranet platform to a
provider of wilderness courses that wants to make its employees more
productive.
For an undisclosed fee, North Carolina Outward Bound, which offers courses
in mountaineering, backpacking, whitewater canoeing, whitewater rafting,
rock climbing, mountain biking and sea kayaking, agreed to use
Mindbridge.com’s IntraSmart product as the foundation for its corporate
portal.
North Carolina Outward Bound, a leader in its field for 35 years, will be
using Mindbridge’s IntraSmart platform to help the help in 50 schools access
and share documents, schedule group calendars, utilize bulletin boards, look
up employee addresses and phone numbers, and read organization or department
announcements online.
IntraSmart operates on Windows NT running Microsoft Internet Information
Server, Netscape Enterprise Server or Apache Web Server, or on Sun Solaris
running the Netscape or Apache server.
“Users have the capability to customize IntraSmart to their specifications,
thus giving the appearance of a custom-built
intranet without the costs and time constraints such a solution would
entail,” said Scott Testa, Mindbridge’s vice president of marketing.
“The payoff is accelerated information dissemination and access, and tighter
relationships with students, partners and employees.”
Some of Mindbridge.com’s more illustrious clients include The US Defense
Department, Sony and Houghton Mifflin.
Just how important is the maturation of a company’s intranet. Very, said one
industry analyst.
Hadley Reynolds, The Delphi Group’s director of research, said portal
development is a necessary second stage in the maturing of corporate
intranets.
“Two years ago, our research projected an unprecedented growth in intranet
adoption, as the Global 2000 caught on to the potential of Internet
technology to bring a new level of information accessibility and impact to
the enterprise,” Reynolds said. “It is transparent now that the rapid spread
of intranets has initially perpetuated the challenges of information silos,
bottlenecks, and backlogs that were the problems in the first place.”