What is 'best practice' for setting the default homepage of an
internet browser app in a company setting? Example: Microsoft Internet
Explorer default homepage is msn.com. Should the homepage be defaulted
to the company's inTRAnet site or is it best practice to set to an
external inTERnet site? What are most company's doing?

The best practice is to set the Company Intranet Page.

Since most companys have an external internet site to adverstise their
services, it is common to set the homepage to this.  If the company
has an intranet that contains valuable information, then it is best
that this be set to the homepage.  Alternatively a page can be created
locally to include frames for both intranet/internet pages or a couple
of different news feeds.

abh2006-ga

I think practically there are two parts to this question. Best
practice is subjective by industry, I can tell you however that of the
several Fortune 500 companies I consult for an Intranet or Extranet
(shared between business partners) is the most common. The content of
either though varies. Some are toolsets for completing very common
chores, others can be little more than news tickers or HR portals.

The second part I would mention is how to set this for everyone in the
company. I'm assuming you'll be using a Windows environment and so
Active Directory based. So editing the GPO settings at User
Configuration > Windows Settings > Internet Explorer Maintenance >
URLs > Important URLs. You can set Home page, Search Bar and Online
Support URLs here.

Does this answer your question?

affordablemagic-ga

In these days, companies usually have two web sites -- Intranet site
and Internet site.  The Internet site target to the customers/clients,
while the Intranet site usually serves as knowledge base for
employees.  Therefore, most companies would set the companies's
intranet site as default homepage for office computers

BlueSagi

Recently the administrators changed the homepage on our computer from
google to the local intranet site. This was a bad move in my opinion,
when most people access the internet at work its for the purpose of
research or visting a website becuase of this it was a lot more
convient to have direct access to a search engine than to the
companies intranet site. If workers will need the intranet site they
will access it through their own thinking.

Another thing that the admins made a mistake was to set up a hyperlink
to google on the intranet, in theory a good idea but the problem came
when they had set it to open in a seperate window. Half of the
computers that we use have less than 256MB RAM so opening another
browser window wasted another few seconds of time!

So in my opinion it best to make a search engine your homepage. But
all organisations are different, if your intranet is reguarly updated
and contains relevant information for your workers this might be
convient, but if all the internet is used for is research,
communication I would stick to a search engine.

Another idea would be to let the workers decide, they know what the
best working practices are for them, let them decided, perhaps through
a survey using email.

Hope That Helps!

The home page has to be decided on the basis of the requirement,

If your company has an employee addressing page in intranet (something
like announcements, news etc) that is best suitable for being the home
page, you can call these as splash pages, which should be catchy and
informative..

If your company does not have an option to do this, an intyernet
website would do, but not like that of Msn coz that can  prove to be
distracting and way off work, try to incorporate and internet site
that you may have to use in the daily line of action,

Take my suggestion Go for www.google.com if you dont have a intranet
based company splash website

Regards

Perhaps the best practice is to set by default the companyīs Intranet
page, but there are Intranets and Intranets. If yours has applications
that are really useful for you and your work, use it without doubt.
Internet ones they usually have no useful information for their
employees, and there are also some Intranet ones, that are quite
"statics", and they donīt offer anything useful. Letīs say that your
decision implies the use of the applications that they offer to you.

In my personal experience, I leave home pages blank. I hate when any
time you open a new browser window, it has to load the default page,
or wait for it when you were going to do something else-it breaks your
concentration.

University computers tend to default to their intranet sites