Intranet Costs

Readers are asking about costs for implementing an intranet. This is a question with no clear answer for several reasons:

• Companies don’t as a rule publish costs for internal communications so benchmarks are hard to come by.
• There are almost as many solutions as there are intranets, ranging from externally hosted solutions with no up-front costs to full enterprise class implementations that include costly middleware platforms, search engines and CMS platforms.
• The internal capabilities of your IT group will be an important determinant of how much you’ll have to spend: If they have experience with open source tools & platforms that lend themselves to intranet development you can avoid some or all of the ongoing expense of licenses for proprietary software.
• Flip side of the previous point: Internal development costs can easily exceed licensing fees (though you’ll usually get an intranet that better meets your business requirements). How such internal costs are accounted for by your finance team is an important consideration when tallying the cost side of your ROI calculations.

I’ll follow up with another post with some recommendations on considerations you should keep in mind when calculating costs.

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