'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

This briefing draws a clear line between two separate functionalities: personalisation and segmentation.

This article discusses the results of a worldwide survey conducted to guage what extent personalisation is being used in intranets and portals.

The functionality of the content management system (CMS) is obviously a key deciding factor when purchasing a new product. Equally important is the usability of the CMS. If staff, particularly authors, cannot easily make use of the CMS, then the system will never be a success, regardless of how powerful it may be. The overall usability of CMS products, and their suitability for their intended users, is therefore increasingly closely scrutinised during the evaluation and selection process. One key challenge remains, however, which is how best to define (and ultimately evaluate) the 'usability' of a content management system. While there

I'm doing a lot of work at the moment helping organisations select a content management system. One of the key aspects of this is making sure that our clients get to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of each product, and the vendor demos the major way of achieving this. The first step is to prepare scenarios that outline a "day in the life" of the CMS, and to have these used as a "script" for the vendors. At the end of the session, we then use a very simple scoring scheme for each of the narrative requirements: Score Rating

There is a ‘rule of thirds’ that can be used to categorise the main types of forms that exist on an intranet.

It would seem to be a statement of the obvious that organisations should do their planning before embarking on the implementation of their new content management system (CMS). Yet all too often this doesn't occur. Let's state this more strongly: the day after the contract is signed with the CMS vendor, the vendor will show up asking: so, what are we actually implementing? If there is not a clear and simple answer to this, the project will go poorly, and the vendor will be more than a little frustrated (which itself may have consequences). This briefing explores the specific details

Organisations often make the selection of a CMS much harder than it needs to be. They do this by running into common pitfalls that impact not just on the selection process, but on the overall success of the CMS project. Over the past ten years, we have worked with many organisations on content management systems, and have seen a huge number of tenders released to the marketplace. Across these projects, the same issues are seen again and again. These most often relate to how the requirements are documented, or how the overall tender is structured. They may also arise from

This keeps coming up: one of the benefits that is sold for portals is that users can "personalise" (or tailor) what content and functionality is displayed on their home page. The problem is that users don't personalise, despite the hopes (and optimism) of the IT team. Now, I "know" that the real-life statistic is that only 5-10% of users personalise. This means that 90-95% of staff will leave the portal as-is, leaving the portal owners with the same design, usability and IA challenges they had with the intranet. The problem is that I don't have an official source for this