One question that often arises early in the process is whether the same CMS should be used for the website and intranet, or whether two solutions should be deployed.

Historically, this question was often driven by a desire to reuse the public-facing CMS for the intranet. These days, the question is equally likely to relate to reusing the intranet solution (such as SharePoint) for the website.

While there are advantages to having a single solution, this is not a ‘slam dunk’ option as this article will explore.

[May article, read the full article]

I’m therefore pleased to be giving an extended presentation on this at the upcoming Website Management study group being run by Ark Group on January 19, 2011.

The format of the day will give plenty of time for in-depth discussions, and hands-on problem-solving. It’s not too late to sign up to attend!

Now, wikis are not a silver bullet to our information and content management challenges, and I have argued that a wiki as an intranet is an intranet. That being said, I think content management vendors and intranet teams can learn from wiki products, and can make some simple changes to improve outcomes:

• Intranets were never meant to be updated by just a core group of publishers. Instead, the goal was always to have the “business own their own content”. Wikis should remind intranet teams that having broad engagement in the intranet is necessary for success.
• Intranets, regardless of the publishing tool used, should have a “edit this page” button available everywhere. Staff should then be provided with a simple front-end interface for updating content, without the hassles and complexities all too often imposed by CMS products.
• Workflow should then be turned off for most areas of the intranet (as workflow doesn’t work). Instead, like wikis, there should be universal versioning and a focus on quickly updating content rather than trying to “get it right” before publishing.
• The focus should be on accountability and transparency, rather than security.
• The bottom-up ease of creating new pages in wikis should also be replicated by intranet teams. While wiki advocates fail to look beyond initial organic growth, they can achieve much greater levels of involvement from staff.
• Perhaps most broadly, intranet teams should aim to generate the same culture of content that wikis can achieve. That is, the sense of community and personal involvement in content, rather than the “intranet as corporate repository”.

At the end of the day, I don’t care about the publishing tools that underpin the intranet, as long as they work and are used appropriately. I am also not arguing for throwing away our intranets and replacing them with wikis. That would be naive.

It is, however, a good time to take a fresh look at how we manage and grow our intranets, and to learn lessons from the wider community.

Thoughts, comments?

When selecting a content management system, the question of open-source vs closed-source often comes up. Which is better? Which is a better fit to the project?

This presentation argues that “open-source” is the wrong question, and instead outlines three key questions to ask. (It starts with a discussion of the commercial CMS marketplace, so feel free to skip forward to the open-source section if you want to save time.)

Audio recorded at the LGWebNetwork conference in Sydney on 21 August 2008.