I agree with the consensus that seems to be emerging:

If adding weather to the intranet is directly *useful*, then definitely do it.

Otherwise, it may be beneficial for cultural or branding reasons, but don’t allocate the most valuable real-estate to it.

I’ve seen too many giant embedded weather iframes and images with tons of branding for the info provider or even ads. Ridiculous! Find a feed that gives you 20 characters of basic info, and stick that in an out of the way corner using server-side code and cached data on the server without an extra http request.

Employees are humans too, and need non-work things to break up the stress of their jobs.

It’s often the small things that count. When we survey our staff, often what they like most about our intranet is our use of different headers for special occasions – ala Google.

If it is as simple as adding weather on the intranet, then the loss of a small amount of real estate is a small price to pay for increased employee engagement and a more comfortable working place.

If you’re looking for direct business benefits, consider employee retention and job satisfaction. It may be hard to measure the intranet’s contribution, but think about what makes people loyal to a hotel chain, a rental car company or a brand.

It’s the details that matter.

I have a weather app on my BlackBerry — so it displays the temp on the bottom of the screen. That’s it. So why not have one little line showing “## degrees”?

Then again, maybe the entire org should just get weather apps for their phones and not use the intranet.

The organization has offices in 4 cities in the US and many employees frequently traveled between them. There were pages for each location, which included temporary office availability and signup, contact information for critical services, the cafeteria menus, local housing options, and the local 10-day weather forecasts.

The traveling employees told us they found these resources invaluable for trip planning.

In this part of the world (Denmark), I would say that weather does meet the criteria in our many farming organisations, but less so in other organisations, e.g. banks or pharma.

On a related note: I’ve had similar heated debates when it comes to the famous stock quote ticker on the intranet homepage. This may not be fun to follow at the moment, but certainly meets the criteria, but can also be quite a distraction.

My organisation works in the Government environment/timber space, and weather is one of the most important user applications we provide particularly around fire season. It provides at-a-glance knowledge of what’s happened in relevant areas and hotspots and enables users, particularly those who form part of state fire teams, to use the information as an indicator for planning their week.

However, whenever someone asks me if something could be included on a homepage, or in fact anywhere within an intranet, always goes back to the three key questions:

1) Is it useful for a majority of the cohort group accessing that specific resource?
2) Can it be maintained/updated enough to be of continual use?
3) Will they actually use it frequently enough to justify its existence?

If the answer is no to any of those questions, your request doesn’t even get off the drawing board.

I have trouble dealing with evaluating the business priorities of requests by content contributors competing for their share of the real estate.

We have had to resort to drawing up an editorial map that includes every inch of every aspect of the available communication channels e.g. the intranet & website home pages, email footers, internal & external newsletters, even the ticker on the TV in the lift lobby.

Like those who request new discussion forums, the people likely to be asking for the weather details might refer to it once, but then go back to their BOM bookmark thereafter.

Thanks, John

For the rest, there are too many sites and widgets for weather info. There’s no reason to waste valuable real estate on it.