The most common intranet projects are redesigns. These may be triggered for a variety of reasons:

• fixing up a old and dying site
• improving the usability and design of the intranet
• moving to a new and better technology platform
• introducing key new features (such as social)

At best, they can transform how staff use the site, and the dramatically increase the value that the intranet delivers to the organisation. At worst, they can be the classic “lipstick on a pig” — cosmetically different, but still a pig.

What do great intranet redesigns look like?
What process should teams take to ensure the best outcomes?

Uncovering successful intranet redesigns

Recognising how common redesigns are, we’re keen to shine a light on great projects across the globe. To that end, the 2013 Intranet Innovation Awards introduces a new category: intranet rework.

This has been specifically created to celebrate high-impact  projects that revamp the design, structure and functionality of intranets.

It’s called “intranet rework” because this is about more than just cosmetic and usability changes. It’s for projects that reimagine how intranet can help people in their work.

Have you delivered a great intranet project?

If so, you have until May 31 to submit an entry for this year’s Awards. Drop us a line if you’d like to chat about your entry, or to get some pointers on what to submit.

We can’t wait to see what projects teams have done!

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Now that we’ve got our own conference out of the way, we can start to think about the events we’ll be involved in for the rest of 2013.

At this point, this involves a return to Europe in September by James. This includes presenting at several conferences in the UK, on the topic of intranets (what else!). Depending on how the book-writing process goes over the next month, it might also include an international book launch

Would you like some of James Robertson’s time during the trip? This could include presenting at an event, running a workshop, or providing consulting.

The week of September 16-20 is currently free. Drop James a line if you’d like to chat about the possibilities.

(Photo by cubby_t_bear.)

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What great solutions have you delivered on your intranet?

It is now two weeks until entries close for the 2013 Intranet Innovation Awards.

This is your chance to get invaluable (and international) recognition for your hard work, so read about how to enter.

Not sure what to enter?

1. Browse through the Award categories (including examples of previous winners).
2. Explore how to demonstrate the benefits (with or without concrete numbers).
3. Obtain the Intranet Innovations reports from previous years.
4. Drop us a line, and get some feedback and input!

Entries close on May 31, so submit your entry soon!

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The Intranet Innovation Awards are now open for entries, with a closing date of May 31. For the judges of the Awards, this is like the week before Christmas, waiting to see what presents will be under the tree.

To further build the sense of anticipation, we’ve asked the judging panel what entries they’d love to see. This is what they said:

• solutions that use uniquely mobile approaches to improve the way business gets done
• SharePoint used to transform business processes
• intranet redesigns that have a big business impact
• use of geolocation in enterprise mobility
• prediction markets used to solve business problems
• big data brought to life
• social tools genuinely embedded in processes with measurable impact
• anything which blurs the line between the intranet and the outside world
• notification systems for enhanced information filtering brought to reality
• homepages that are THE place where employees start their day (as opposed to opening up their email client)
• targeted social channels to solve specific business problems
• innovative ways organizations are supporting tele workers
• internal crowd sourcing activities: the goals, the results
• multilingual intranets that ensure that all users have access to all information, no matter what languages they understand
• brilliantly simple solutions which makes us go “why didn’t I think of that!”

So: what are you planning to enter? An idea from this list, or something completely different?

See how to enter, and feel free to surprise us

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With a huge response and voting now closed ahead of the conference, we’ve selected the most popular intranet myths. Drumroll please…

The myths to be busted are:

1. Social Collaboration replaces traditional intranets
2. Everything must be 3 clicks or less from the homepage
3. Intranets don’t need navigation, only search
4. Scrolling pages are evil

At Intranets2013 next week our 4 intranet experts will blow these myths to pieces! If you can’t be there on the day, stay tuned on Twitter for the explosive results!

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(This is an event we take very seriously, and no aspect has been left to chance.)

So with only one week to go, you’d be mad not to place a last-minute registration.
See you soon!

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It’s now just two weeks until the conference. We’re keeping a close eye on the numbers, as we expect to sell out before the closing date, so don’t delay!

This is Australia’s biggest intranet event, run by people who are passionate about the topic.

The conference will:

• help you to prepare for upcoming intranet projects, by giving you practical insights into what works (and what doesn’t)
• connect you with other teams, allowing you to establish career-long connections which will benefit all your activities
• inspire you about true potential of intranets to help staff and the business as a whole

Browse the conference programme, and we’ll see you in May!

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Late last year, we sold out of the posters, and we took the opportunity to revisit and refresh this much-loved resource.

The Intranet Roadmap (2nd edition)

Now released as a second edition, the Intranet Roadmap continues to provide a guiding beacon for teams faced with designing or redesigning their intranet.

While the core methodology outlined in the Roadmap is as valid today as when we first released it, we’ve made a number of valuable improvements:

• the methodology has been updated to reflect the much larger range of technology options now on offer
• the booklet has been fully reviewed and updated
• purchasers now have access to an online index to all related Step Two articles, accessed via QR codes on the poster and in the booklet

The combination of the wallchart and booklet is invaluable for any team looking to develop or redevelop an intranet, and it assists in both planning and reviewing the approach taken.

Use this best-practice intranet methodology to bring order to the complex and inter-related aspects that make up an intranet project.

Read more and purchase online

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The permanent members of our judging panel consists of true intranet experts: Martin White of Intranet Focus (UK), Jane McConnell of NetStrategyJMC (France) and the team at Step Two (Australia).

Each year, we invite highly experienced intranet practitioners to join the judging panel to represent the needs of hands-on intranet managers.

This year, we have two superb practitioner judges:

Martha Brown, Duke Energy (USA)

Martha has been the program manager for Duke Energy’s intranet since 2005. The intranet serves all of the Duke Energy workforce, approximately 49,000 people. During this time, the intranet moved onto the SharePoint 2007 platform, was redesigned, and will be upgraded to the SharePoint 2010 platform in July 2013. In July 2012, the number of people using the intranet grew by 58% as Duke Energy merged with neighboring Progress Energy. Work continues to blend the two intranets and find creative solutions to help employees find the tools and information they need as the companies complete their integration and redefine their culture as one new organization.

Passionate about how an intranet can inspire employee engagement, Martha has been involved in setting strategy and policy around the use of internal social media at Duke Energy. Her goal is to help the intranet reflect an inviting and inclusive culture that inspires all employees to connect and contribute.

Ernst Décsey, UNICEF (Switzerland)

Ernst Décsey is a communication specialist (intranet) for UNICEF private fundraising and partnerships in Switzerland. Ernst is passionate about the digital workplace and intranets where he’s been active since 15 years. He is active on twitter (@ernstdecsey) and runs his own blog (digitalworkplace).

He currently manages the UNICEF intranet that reaches all UNICEF National Committees around the globe. Ernst has also been leading UNHCR’s intranet and is a firm believer in new ways of working.

Enter the Awards!

Many thanks to our practitioner judges! Don’t forget that entries close on 31 May 2013, so read about how to enter, and make sure you don’t miss out on your chance to win a lovely glass trophy.

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Hopefully there’s been a content cleanup, and a lot of the old and unused content has gone. This may still leave thousands or tens of thousands of pages to migrate.

As outlined in the previous article Content migration: options and strategies, there are three broad options for doing the migration:

1. automated migration
2. migration by hand
3. partially automated migration

These pros and cons of these options are explored at some length in the article referenced. In practice, organisations are likely to do much of the migration by hand, supplemented by automated or semi-automated migration of key content areas.

(The less difference there is between the old and new technology platforms, the greater the opportunity for automated migration.)

Regardless of the migration approach being considered, there is a clear goal: to deliver a sustainable, effective and valuable intranet.

The decisions made about the migration, and how it involves content authors, are critical in achieving this outcome. This briefing explores how.

[April article by James Robertson, read the full article]

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Over time, an organic process somewhere between glacial and viral overtakes the well designed structures (assuming they were there to begin with) and starts to clog the pathways and interfere with the effectiveness of the intranet. You may have watched this process over time or simply inherited it because of a new role, perspective or sense of responsibility.

Regardless of how you arrived here, you are faced with a significant quantity of content, but with little visibility of its structure and make up. Diving into a redesign without this visibility is both daunting and ill-advised.

But where to start?

The standard approach is to list all of the content, carve it up, distribute among assumed owners, remove the unwanted, and after several iterations of this, recombine the list. Valuable though this is in identifying ownership and reducing the volume of content, it many not have added any insight around existing or proposed structures.

When managing larger audits with many hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of items, it becomes increasingly valuable to overlay the standard process with a process to manage the audit at different degrees of granularity. Not only does this provide visibility in a dynamic way, it also simplifies the steps when conducting the design steps to follow.

[April article by Stephen Byrne, read the full article]

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Some of the most widely spread theories are in fact false, while many real insights remain hidden away within organisations.

No longer! As part of the Intranets2013 conference in Sydney (just three weeks to go!), Step Two Designs will be bringing together four intranet experts to bust the most common intranet myths.

Whether you’re attending the conference or not, here’s your chance to vote on what you think are the top myths!

We’ll then pick the four most popular myths to bust, live on stage at Intranets2013. After the conference, we’ll write up the insights from the session and share them with the wider community.

Vote on your top myths here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/intranetmyths and let us know any further thoughts in the comments below!

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So when we organised the programme for Intranets2013, we made sure we were bringing out some great international speakers. And make no mistake, they haven’t been invited because they work for some high-profile company you’ve heard of. We’ve included them in the conference because they’re all super-smart and have important ideas to share.

This could be the only chance you’ll get to see these folks in Australia, and don’t forget that it’s just over 3 weeks until the conference, so register now.

Michal Pisarek (Canada)

Michal Pisarek is the founder of Dynamic Owl and a high-profile Microsoft MVP. Acknowledged as a thought leader in the SharePoint space, he is a frequent speaker at many international events and has been referenced in publications and presentations by organisations such as Gartner and Step Two.

Sam Marshall (UK)

Sam Marshall (UK) is the owner of ClearBox Consulting and has specialised in intranets, collaboration and the digital workplace for over 15 years. He was responsible for Unilever’s global portal implementation, managing the roll-out of over 700 online communities to 90,000 people and consolidating several thousand intranets into a single system. Sam will provide practical and inspirational insights into making intranets work in the real world.

Jonathan Phillips (UK)

Jonathan Phillips (UK) is Senior Manager of Digital Communications at Coca-Cola Enterprises, where he’s been managing their intranet in one form or another for the best part of a decade. He is also co-founder of the blog Intranetizen. Jonathan will be sharing what Coca-Cola have been doing in the intranet and mobile space, and it’s sure to impress.

Ingeborg Hawighorst (New Zealand)

Ingeborg Hawighorst is a Microsoft MVP, currently working for Powerco in New Plymouth, New Zealand. She has over 25 years of IT experience, and as team leader of information management at Powerco, she has been working with SharePoint 2010 as an administrator and site manager.

Kim Sbarcea (New Zealand)

Kim Sbarcea (NZ) specialises in individual and organisational transformational change. She was the Chief Knowledge Officer for a global professional services firm and Director of KM in an Australian Federal Government agency. For the last two years she’s worked for an agency of the United Nations, based in Rome, and she’ll be sharing insights from this remarkable project.

Plus more

We’ve also brought together a stellar set of local speakers, covering a wide range of relevant topics for intranet teams. Browse through the full programme, and then register.

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It’s now just under four weeks until Intranets2013 bursts onto the Sydney scene (May 15-17). On the back of running great events in 2011 and 2012, interest is running very high this year.

So it’s worth highlighting that there are now only 29 places left for the conference. If you were planning to attend, don’t leave it too late to register!

Two great post-conference workshops

In addition to two days packed with inspiring presentations, there are also two full-day post-conference workshops. These provide an opportunity to explore two very different topics, with the workshops run by true experts in their field.

Sam Marshall is recognised as one of the foremost intranet experts in the UK. He was responsible for Unilever’s global portal implementation, managing the roll-out of over 700 online communities to 90,000 people and consolidating several thousand intranets into a single system.

Sam will be running a one-day workshop on Real-world intranet strategy and governance.  Sam regularly runs his highly regarded workshops in the UK, but this is the first time he’ll be bringing his insights to Australia. Not to be missed!

Matthew Magain is the co-founder of UX Mastery, an online training resource for aspiring UX designers. Matt has been active throughout the web industry, including crafting user interfaces for 99designs and Learnable, and evangelising web standards and accessibility at companies like IBM and PwC.

Matthew will be running a workshop on Design and UX techniques for great intranets. This workshop provides a hands-on opportunity to explore techniques such as wireframes, storyboarding and sketchnotes (shown above). In this visual age, this workshop shares techniques that all teams can benefit from.

Read more about the post-conference workshops, and register now.

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