What should a simple company intranet include?

Four things cover 90% of what employees need: news and announcements (with read receipts for mandatory ones), a people directory with an org chart, team spaces with quick links to the documents and tools each team uses, and a search box that spans all of it.

Why do company intranets fail?

Staleness. When updating content requires a ticket to IT or wrestling a complex CMS, people stop updating it; once employees hit two or three outdated pages, they stop trusting the whole thing and go back to asking in chat. An intranet only works if editing a page is as easy as writing an email.

How much does a company intranet cost?

Enterprise intranet suites often run $5–$12 per employee per month. Flat-rate options like Standard OP Company Intranet cost $99/month for unlimited employees on managed cloud, or $499 for the first year self-hosted (then $99/yr) — white-labelled on your own domain, with setup and support included.

Can a small company set up an intranet without IT staff?

Yes. A managed-cloud intranet needs no IT involvement beyond pointing a subdomain: the vendor hosts, backs up, and updates it. Standard OP's managed plan is typically live in an afternoon, including HRIS or Active Directory sync for the people directory.

A Simple Company Intranet Your Team Will Actually Update (and Actually Use)

Why most intranets die of staleness, what 'easy to update' really requires, and how to launch a company intranet portal in an afternoon.

The short answer: a company intranet succeeds or fails on one variable — how easy it is to update. The winning formula is small: news and announcements, a people directory, team spaces with quick links, and search across all of it, editable by the people who own the content (not IT), hosted at your own subdomain. Everything else is decoration.

Intranets don’t fail at launch. They fail at week six.

Every intranet demo looks great. The failure mode arrives quietly a month later: the holiday calendar is last year’s, the org chart predates two reorgs, and the “New starter guide” links to a form that no longer exists. Employees hit stale content two or three times, conclude the intranet lies, and go back to asking in chat — where the answer scrolls away within the hour, and the cycle repeats.

The root cause is almost never laziness. It’s friction:

Updating a page requires a ticket to IT, or
The CMS demands training nobody received, or
Nobody is named as the owner of any given page.

The test for any intranet: can the office manager update the parking policy page in under two minutes, without asking anyone for help? If not, the intranet will go stale.

The four features that do 90% of the work

1. News & announcements — with read receipts. Chat is where information goes to scroll away. Announcements need a home that stays put, per-department targeting, and read receipts for the ones that are actually mandatory (policy changes, compliance notices). That last part turns “we posted it” into “we know who saw it.”

2. People directory & org chart. “Who does X, and who do they report to?” is the most-asked question in every growing company. The directory has to sync from your HRIS or Active Directory automatically — a manually maintained org chart is stale by definition.

3. Team spaces & quick links. Every team has ten links people can never find: the expense form, the brand folder, the on-call calendar. Give each team a page it owns and can edit itself.

4. Search that actually works. One box that searches people, posts, spaces, and links. With Standard OP’s Company Intranet, OP Intelligence goes one step further and answers plain-language questions (“what’s the parental leave policy?”) with a citation to the source page.

What “easy to update” actually requires

Editing feels like writing an email. No page builders, no layout decisions, no training.
Distributed ownership. HR owns policy pages, each team owns its space, IT owns nothing except the subdomain.
Named owners per page. When content has an owner, staleness has an address.
No deploy step. Hit save, it’s live.

Launch plan: one afternoon

Point a subdomain — intranet.yourcompany.com or home.yourcompany.com. A white-labelled portal on your own domain reads as yours, which drives adoption (and stops phishing-report false alarms).
Sync the directory from your HRIS/AD — the org chart populates itself.
Create three team spaces to start: HR, IT, Operations. Add each team’s ten most-asked-for links.
Post one real announcement with a read receipt, and link the intranet from your email signature and chat topic for two weeks.
Name owners for every page you created. Done.

Resist the urge to migrate everything on day one. An intranet with twelve accurate pages beats one with four hundred stale ones.

The cost picture

Enterprise intranet suites price per user — $5–$12 per employee per month, which is $9,000–$21,600/year for a 150-person company. Flat-rate alternatives change the math: Standard OP Company Intranet is $99/month for unlimited people (managed cloud, setup and support included) or $499 for the first year self-hosted, then $99/year. Either way it’s white-labelled on your own domain and shares one login and one directory with Standard OP’s Performance Review and Knowledge Base.

See intranet pricing — flat price, unlimited people, live in an afternoon, 21-day money-back guarantee.