The top 10 intranets of 2013

The best intranets also take a lot of time and planning to craft, Nielsen notes. Plus, organizations have large teams of employees in place to run them.

With those factors in mind, Ragan.com checked in with four organizations in the top 10—those in the United States or Canada—to find out what set theirs apart from thousands of other intranets around the globe.

Acorda

The biotechnology company, which develops therapeutic neurological treatments, launched Synapse a little over a year ago. Kyle Kuhn, the company’s director of business development, says naming the intranet after conduits in the brain for biochemical communication made sense.

“Communication really is the key word there. That’s what we wanted our intranet to be very effective at,” he says.

The company’s previous intranet was an out-of-the box SharePoint solution. “It wasn’t serving the needs of the company,” Kuhn says.

So Acorda spent months interviewing employees to find out what they wanted in a new platform. The requests ended up boiling down to three things, says Mike Russo, senior director of corporate digital strategy and innovation: quick access to work resources, collaboration, and fun.