When you want to create a new site in your SharePoint intranet, this is the page you’re presented with. It’s pretty daunting for an inexperienced site administrator or content owner:

Should I create a team site or a document workplace?
Would a social meeting workplace be more relevant than a decision meeting workspace?
Maybe I need a blog?
Perhaps just start with a blank site and build from there?

This dialog box gives few clues and little guidance. While nothing is ever set in stone, picking the wrong initial choice will reduce the chances of successful adoption and use.

While this kind of complexity is common across many products, not just SharePoint, it generally leads to patchy and inconsistent intranets that are cluttered with under-used sites.

There are three strategies that can be taken:

1. governance
2. site creation workflows
3. training and support

1. Governance

As discussed in Collaboration Roadmap written by Michael Sampson, it’s important to be clear about who has the rights to actually create a new site on your SharePoint intranet. Will every user be able to create a new site, or will this be restricted to a handful of central administrators?

While there is no one right answer, what’s needed in all cases is good governance. This provide a set of basic guidelines and processes that cover:

• creating new sites
• maintaining and ultimately closing sites
• what functionality can be used
• the rights and authorities granted to site owners

The smaller the number of staff able to create sites, the less training and support is required. (Although the result may be a bottleneck that generates widespread frustration.)

2. Site creation workflows

Another approach is to put some structure around creating new sites. This can include a tailored workflow and approval process that guides users step-by-step through the necessary decisions.

Screenshot courtesy of Coca-Cola.

For example, Coca-Cola in the US has created a “Teamsite Wizard”. This asks a number of key questions, with supporting help content. This makes it easier for staff to create a team site, while ensuring that important information is collected about each site.

Screenshots courtesy of Standard Chartered.

Standard Chartered in the UK goes a step further, creating a fully-fledged process that actively guides staff towards the right choices. Governance is covered off early in the process, and then the user is helped to choose the right template. Key details are then collected for the new site, before going into an approval workflow.

These types of approaches help to put structure around site creation, and are particularly appropriate in larger SharePoint intranet deployments where there is inherently less control around creating new areas.

3. Training and support

SharePoint is a new tool for most, and users will be unfamiliar with what it can do, and how to do it. One of the most obvious ways of addressing this knowledge gap is through training and support.

The work done by Transfield Services, showcased in the Governance and support for SharePoint teamsites report, provides a great example.

Extensive training materials are provided online, written in plain language, and supported by short training videos. Following the learning curve of new administrators, information is provided in bite-size chunks, with links to more in-depth materials where required.

While there is a growing body of excellent third-party training materials and books, Transfield chose to create custom documentation to match the specific functionality they’d turned on (and avoiding the features they turned off). This led to a highly successful deployment, with excellent levels of adoption and use.

Consider all three options

The options presented are not either-or. As the size and scale of a SharePoint intranet increases, it becomes vital to establish all three elements. Even when the IT team pre-creates a set of tailored template choices, users can still struggle to choose the right option.

Look for best practices established by other organisations, and set aside resources to make your SharePoint deployment successful, beyond just turning on the technology and hoping for the best.

What have you seen work?
What have you done on your SharePoint intranet?

Reviewing and rewriting content is a big job and cannot be done by the intranet manager alone. But training authors to write great content is a challenge, as most have never learnt to write for a specific audience.

This article outlines ways to help authors write content that is easy to find, easy to read and easy to use.

Conduct in-house training

More organisations are now recognising the importance of good quality content and are using professional trainers to conduct in-house workshops for intranet authors. This demonstrates the organisation’s commitment to the intranet and the role authors play as well as giving authors another skill to add to their resumes.

[September article by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article]

Designing in the right direction

Intranets can lose their direction for any number of reasons. Some principal ones include:

• the organisational landscape changes significantly due to growth, mergers or change in overall direction
• the intranet becomes a casualty of its own success with expectations exceeding original scope
• there are multiple owners without a single focus to align disparate stakeholder needs

Getting back on track has been discussed in other strategy and design papers including Three elements of every intranet strategy and Intranet (re)design wrap-up, but to summarise:

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

This support must encompass content owners and authors, who are confronted by a new site structure and the requirement to deliver better content.

Training must also be provided on the new technology platform, which offers some complex and unfamiliar capabilities. These may include collaboration and social tools, which aim to change how staff work together.

Many organisations fail to put in place the necessary training and support for an improved intranet, and adoption levels suffer as a result. In the worst cases, the entire intranet project may be considered a failure when content publishers and end users alike rebel against the site changes.

These challenges make the work done by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) particularly impressive.

In the context of the merging of two federal government agencies and major changes in the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, the DEEWR team established comprehensive training initiatives and support materials.

Members of the Intranet Leadership Forum (www.steptwo.com.au/ilf), DEEWR have been generous in sharing examples of their approaches and deliverables.

[May article by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

Governance is about having a framework in place that enables the decision-making and planning processes for the intranet. It provides support for the intranet team and assists with the smooth running of the intranet.

This article discusses the different elements that can make up your governance guide with brief explanations and suggested topics to include in each one. Best of all, the guide can be written incrementally within the intranet team’s time and resources. Stuck with limited time? Start by creating the Five key intranet policies referred to in the earlier article of the same name.

There is no one size fits all when it comes to intranet governance. We suggest looking at the various elements and identifying what is necessary for your organisation. Considering the audience and organisational culture will ultimately guide the process.

The earlier article The basics of governance outlined elements that are present in any governance model including:

[March article written by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article]

The problem is, not only do these simplistic approaches not work, they often make the situation worse. A few examples:

1. Let’s limit email inboxes to only 20meg

The problem: staff use their email programs as long-term storage mechanisms, clogging up servers with an immense amount of old email. The simplistic solution: limit email inboxes to a small size (say 20meg), and then delete any excess on a regular basis.

We’ve seen an organisation do this. The result was that staff saved all their old messages into Outlook “saved mail” (PST) files. When an audit was done of server space, it was discovered that 12 out of 20TB was being used by these files. They can’t be indexed, searched, or virus-checked. Chances are, they will never be opened again by the staff who saved them.

So the inboxes are beautifully small, but the overall space used is larger, and information management is worse.

2. Blow up shared network folders

The problem: there are an immense number of files stored on corporate file servers, across thousands of folders in hundreds of shared drives. The files are poorly named, hard to find, and often duplicated. The simplistic solution: install SharePoint (Lotus Notes, etc), turn off network folders, and force everyone to store their files online instead.

Faced by the prospect of files shares being turned off, staff invariably copy everything they’ve got directly into SharePoint document collections (etc). Files aren’t reviewed, documents aren’t renamed, and little old content is removed. Instead, a one-to-one copy of files simply replicates the same problems in a new space.

The result? A new technology, but the same content and information management problems. And in the process, search is broken, because every search term now returns hundreds of irrelevant files and duplicates.

3. Let’s fully centralised, or fully decentralise

The problem: intranet content is very inconsistent in its quality, currency, relevance and structure. This generates a huge amount of staff (and stakeholder) dissatisfaction. The simplistic solution: fully centralise intranet publishing, so all content is created by a central team with professional skills. Alternatively: fully decentralise, so all content is owned by the business, with no involvement from the central team (if one is left).

The difficulty is this: fully centralised is always a bottleneck; fully decentralised is always anarchy. Neither extreme will deliver a successful intranet, and a mix of strategies will be required, including both centralised and decentralised where appropriate.

4. Three clicks rule

The problem: staff can’t find information on the intranet. The simplistic solution: staff “don’t like to click”, so ensure that all pages are no more than three clicks away from the homepage.

The reality is that this simply doesn’t work, not just because you can’t fit an entire intranet into a structure three levels deep. The underlying assumption is also false: staff are perfectly happy to click as long as they are confident they’re heading in the right direction.

Beware excessive simplicity

I could share a dozen other examples of simplistic approaches, and why they don’t work. The only valid simple rule is this: “The simpler the principle, the more likely it is to be wrong” (hmm, I may be breaking my own principle there).

We should always strive to elegance and simplicity where we can find it, but not to the extent that simplistic approaches actually make the problem worse. At the end of the day, it’s our job as professionals to find strategies that work in our complex organisations, and to constantly adapt these to match changing circumstances.

What are the simplistic rules you’ve seen, and what problems did they cause?

What should be included in the review, to help the team build a better intranet in the coming year? This article suggests some annual activities that will make intranet reviews more productive and useful, but it is not a complete or exhaustive list.

Intranet Review Toolkit

The Intranet Review Toolkit provides guidelines for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your intranet. Substantial heuristics allow a detailed review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy. Use the toolkit on a annual basis to show improvements and highlight areas of need.

For more information see:
www.intranetreviewtoolkit.org

Audit page owners and authors

Staff come and go and in the rush of a handover, intranet responsibilities can be forgotten. An ongoing list of page owners and authors should be kept by the intranet team and reviewed regularly. This is a good time to get in touch with each of your owners/authors to:

• discuss any training needs including refresher courses on writing for the web
• review the purpose of their content
• remind them about the authoring community and the support the intranet team provides

[September 2010 one-pager by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article]

Where every organization should include specifics for social media use, if your organization does not have a separate, superfluous social media policy (that’s right, a social media policy is largely superfluous if you have proper governance and content / editorial policies in place. Someone will make a point of arguing this with me and I will wipe the floor with them), are specific rules in the Terms of Use that spell out the dos and don’ts for contributing content. Additionally, these rules should also be covered, if not already, in your Employee Handbook or Employee Conduct Manual, that all employees agree to at the time of employment (if your organization is responsible enough to have one).

My underlying key message is this: Intranets evolve. They are a process, not a project. Therefore you need to plant “governance seeds” throughout the organization. They will grow and develop as the organization evolves. They will help build a new attitude towards the intranet. They will bring more impact than a governance document!

Lots of practical advice in this post!

In my last blog post I covered open vs. managed community creation inside the enterprise. The next logical question I am asked is “If we do go the managed creation route, what types of questions should we ask the requestors?”. I hear this question often and so decided to share what I share with my customers and ask you to chime in with what else you might have to add. (Keeping in mind we are talking about internal communities within the enterprise.)

We have a tool which checks content every day and informs publishers 4 weeks before the review date expires to review and update or remove the content. Failure to do this results in the content being removed and if no action still taken automatically deleted. This means people can’t use out of date information and make bad decisions because of it.

In a previous article we explained How intranet teams should spend their time. This article outlines some metrics that teams can use to measure their own. These are not the same as the ways to measure the effectiveness of the intranet itself.

Intranet team responsibilities fall into three main areas:

• day-to-day maintenance
• projects and new initiatives
• managing relationships with staff and stakeholders

Day-to-day maintenance

Day-to-day maintenance of the intranet is core business for any intranet team. Most teams will have a variety of valid measures for this, including:

• timeliness of content updates
• number of complete support calls
• number of training sessions run for the publishers
• adherence to service level agreements
• number of content pages reviewed
• up time for the intranet

[CM Briefing 2010-03 written by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

“Our department is different!” This is a common and legitimate response from groups used to managing their own websites. They argue that their needs are so specific there is little chance a common template can work.

I’ve been thinking about the badges that a few social sites are using as incentives to their user communities – specifically foursquare and, more recently, Blip. So many people I talk to are looking for ways to encourage adoption of their enterprise intranets, knowledge bases, and collaborative workspaces. Plugging in a suite of profile badges, easily customized for each organization’s desired behaviors, would be a fun, low-overhead way to achieve that.

I like it!

Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way. But if you visit a CMS customer a while after implementation you are likely to find that the responsibility of adding content is still concentrated in a relatively small proportion of the employee population.