The goal of many intranets is to deliver high quality, up-to-date, accurate and useful information to staff. In practice, however, this can be challenging to achieve. Much is expected of intranet authors, and they are vital to delivering an intranet that is useful (and used). Yet, in many cases, intranet authoring is treated as a hobby within organisations. This briefing looks at the role of intranet authors, and challenges organisations to either take intranet authoring seriously, or to let go of unrealistic expectations regarding content quality and timeliness. Is intranet authoring a hobby? There are a number of clear signs

Much is expected of intranet authors, in terms of the quality, accuracy and timliness of published material. Yet, many organisations treat intranet authoring as a…

Enterprise portals (generally known as just 'portals') rose to prominence several years ago. Complementing or replacing earlier technologies, portals promise to deliver a more coherent information management platform, and a more seamless user experience for staff. Now that the early hype has died down, it is not surprising to find that portals are not a 'silver bullet' solution to all the information delivery challenges within organisations. Like all technologies, portals have their strengths and weaknesses. These need to be well understood if they are to be successfully implemented within businesses. This article outlines the characteristics (good and bad) of enterprise

The need for improvements in information management systems and practices within organisations is great. Spend half a day talking with a random selection of staff, and the list of desirable fixes and enhancements will be lengthy. Whether it is the need to log into three different applications to complete a single task, or the filling out of a poorly-designed paper form where an electronic one would work better. Staff are struggling to do their jobs, and we are not providing them with good tools or systems to help in their day-to-day tasks. So my question is: why are we wasting

One of the greatest fears when selecting a new content management system (CMS) is that the vendor will go bust, leaving the purchaser without support or upgrades. While this is certainly an important risk to manage, more careful consideration must be made beyond just selecting a 'big' CMS vendor and hoping for the best. This briefing outlines the issues, and presents some potential approaches for mitigating the risk that your chosen vendor will not survive. Will your vendor go bust? As indicated above, one risk that needs to be considered when selecting a CMS vendor is that they may not

A little while back, I wrote an article that suggested that in some cases workflow is the wrong solution within content management systems (CMS). This week I've been sitting in on four different vendor demos, as part of helping a client to select a CMS. One of the issues that came up strongly was the problems and limitations of workflow. Their needs are simple, and can be best summarised in the following scenario: There is a single centralised author who publishes content to the corporate website. Most of this information has already been signed off by legal, or publicly released

Efforts should be targeted at improving the quality of key information, while applying lower standards to the majority of intranet content.

Product costs and license terms Importance to consumers? Very important 56% Important 24% Somewhat important 16% Not important 4% How do vendor websites rate? Very good 5% Good 13% Acceptable 13% Poor 39% Very poor 30% It would seem obvious that customers are looking for prices. Our survey respondents expressed exasperation with the rarity of this simple selling point, and the way their time was wasted. "Be up-front about pricing. If you're beyond my budget, don't waste my time with information, presentations, sales pitches etc." "You have to go through the process of contacting them and getting the full sales

Product demos and samples Importance to consumers? Very important 47% Important 37% Somewhat important 13% Not important 3% How do vendor websites rate? Very good…

“They need to organise the information better so people can find what they need.” Websites, especially those produced by sophisticated content management systems, should be…