Gold winner: IBM (USA)
Categorised under: Interface design, Intranets, intranet innovation awards
The w3 Toolbar is an active, multi-functional browser tool enabling users to recommend, share and link to content, files and more. Screenshot courtesy of IBM.
Post 3 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.
IBM is one of the world’s best known technology companies, providing hardware, software and services for thousands of organisations across the globe. The company has over 390,000 employees, and mass of internal systems for staff to use. Recognising some complaints about the ease of finding various systems, a two-man team in a small business unit set about creating the w3 Toolbar – a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ for the browser, and the first intranet-focused Toolbar the Award judges had seen.
Installing the w3 toolbar for Internet Explorer (IE) or Firefox gives IBMers a range of tools.
Search and integration
With the w3 Toolbar, employees can quickly search Google, w3, BluePages, IBM’s media Library (i.e., podcasts), Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, etc. – you name it.
Bookmark and recommend
Staff can save and tag useful Web pages and easily find similar bookmarks that other employees have created, or even people who have similar interests. These bookmarks can be accessed from any computer in the world.
Staff can also recommend pages to colleagues and groups and view their own recommendations in an email digest, as a Web feed subscription, or within the toolbar itself.
The bookmarks and recommendations help IBM’s internal search system identify content that is most valuable to IBMers, improving the quality of search results for everyone.
Learning Rx and Links
Quick access to career guidance and all kinds of great resources.
IBM stock price
A quick glance at this toolbar widget shows you the current IBM stock price.
MyStuff
MyStuff gives employees quick access to their blog, profile, podcasts, shared files, essential links, tags and tagged pages, and recommendations.
BlueThx
Give and get recognition from colleagues.
File sharing
Share files with colleagues/groups with and view/ download the files shared.
News
View IBM Top Stories and subscriptions from IBM’s in-house feed reader, which helps IBMers find and stay current on the latest news and information from all their favourite Web sites, aggregating all this content in one convenient place.
This feature also helps mitigate the massive amounts of content produced and syndicated both within IBM and on the Internet, allowing employees to quickly save and share this information with others.
The w3 Toolbar is a practical, useful and innovative application for the IBM w3 intranet. Its brings together disparate systems into one easy-to-use interface, increasing productivity for intranet users, highlighting the availability of tools that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, and solves a frustrating problem many employees were experiencing.
(For full details of this Award-winning entry, obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 