A lot of intranet and portal projects aim to deliver functionality related to personalisation or customisation. This may involve tailoring information based on staff role, delivering news relevant for specific offices, or limiting access to information based on seniority. Any of these capabilities requires the system to know who staff are, the business unit they belong to, and where they sit in the real world. Unfortunately, too many of these projects run aground before they start because a key piece of IT infrastructure has not been correctly put in place. LDAP and Active Directory Sitting invisibly behind the scenes in

Before personalisation can be implemented, underlying LDAP or Active Directory implementations need to be cleaned up.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for meeting the needs of staff. Beyond the broadest level, the information needed by staff is not generic. Someone working in HR has quite distinct needs from a staff member in finance, the call centre, or in the sales team. This is why organisations are progressively implementing personalisation or segmentation features as part of their corporate intranets or portals. While the functionality that can be implemented varies greatly, there is a single goal: to better target information to the specific staff who need it. In practice, there are three main ways of segmenting staff needs

Intranets have now grown to be core tools for most organisations, tools they cannot do without. Despite this, it is still a struggle for intranet teams to gain the resources and support they need to sustain and grow their sites. In general, it is not hard to describe what the 'perfect intranet' looks like, and each intranet team can generally paint a clear picture of their desired future site. What is needed, however, is a roadmap that helps intranet teams to get from 'here' to 'there' within current resource limits and other constraints. The 6x2 methodology provides a powerful new

Implementing a new website or intranet is a unique opportunity to work with new functionality and ideas and push the bounds of what the site will do. When a new underlying platform is being implemented, such as a content management system or portal, the scope for rethinking the site can be increased further. Yet, despite all of this opportunity for change, the simple rule of thumb is that the new site will be at best 20% different from the current site. There are fundamental reasons for this, which will be explored in this briefing. The implications of the rule for

When it comes to information management or content management strategies, particularly at the enterprise level, there is a strong tendency (and desire) to create long-term plans. These plans may outline activities more than of 18 or 24 months in advance, starting with the deployment of base infrastructure, through to the final delivery of strong business functionality. These plans mostly fail, and few ever end up delivering the hoped-for benefits. While this is not an argument for abandoning strategic planning entirely, it raises a question whether long-term plans are the most sensible approach. This briefing will explore some of the issues

No longer the antithesis of working hard, online chat has become an integral part of core business processes in some organisations. Across both the public and private sectors there is a trend toward online chat as a valid business tool, particularly in call centre environments. By using online chat to supplement traditional information sources such as intranets and training folders, staff are provided with answers to specific problems and questions and access to specific staff in real-time. Online chat can be used to: to leverage the collective knowledge resources and research capability of the team as a training and management

All too often, 18-24 month information management strategies fail to deliver benefits, but there is an alternative.

'Personalisation' is a term very much in fashion at present. It is used by vendors to sell their products, and promoted by website and intranet managers as a way of delivering a brave new era of functionality. Separate from debates regarding the merits and approaches to personalisation, there is considerable confusion about the meaning of the word itself. As the use of personalisation spreads, this confusion has grown. Personalisation is now routinely used for everything from 'my links' functionality, to fine-grained targeting of information to specific staff roles. The absence of consistent terminology in this space is now causing considerable

Due to technology improvements, personalisation is a growing feature in both intranet and portal usage. Organisations around the world have already made their first forays into personalisation, however many more organisations are questioning what to personalise and how to go about it. So who is using personalisation and how effective it is? Early in 2007 we ran a worldwide survey to establish the extent that personalisation is being used in intranets and portals. This article discusses the results of the survey, common themes within the survey and some observations on personalisation projects throughout the world. Comments from the survey respondents