Intranets can grow to be thousands, tens of thousands or millions of pages in size. With content as far as the eye can see, the challenge is to keep it up to date, accurate and useful.

Sitting behind this huge volume of content are a wide range of approaches to creating and publishing pages.

The central team has a clear role to play in managing this content, as do publishing guidelines and intranet governance documents.

Yet the central team alone cannot manage thousands of pages, and a decentralised publishing model is established to give business areas responsibility for maintaining their own content. New authors do, however, require support and training.

Against this backdrop of ‘traditional’ publishing models, the growth of web 2.0 and ‘user-generated content’ is raising new questions about how to maintain an intranet.

The key challenge is to establish the right mix of publishing models, flexible in many cases, rigid in others. The intranet team needs to manage the overall process, including adjusting approaches when circumstances change.

This article explores five fundamental publishing models for intranets, providing a description of each, and a brief summary of strengths and weaknesses.

Use these models as the starting point for discussions with authors and stakeholders, and put in place a balanced mix of publishing approaches that deliver the best standard of content within resource constraints.

[May KM Column, read the full article]