Most intranets have some form of policies and procedures, typically focusing on authoring guidelines and standards. The question is: are these the right policies to have? In many cases, intranet teams have established policies that they find difficult to enforce, while missing the opportunity to develop policies that will be much more beneficial for both the intranet team and the site itself. This briefing takes a different look at the role of intranet policies, and outlines five policies that all intranet teams should develop. The role of intranet policies Policies and procedures are all too often written as administrative or

Improving the effectiveness of internal communications is often one of the key goals underpinning corporate intranets. In practice, this is often reflected in 'latest news' section on the home page of most intranets. While news on the home page is certainly widespread, the question needs to be asked: how effective is it? This article explores the role of the intranet as a news channel, revisiting some of the assumptions about how best to deliver online news within an organisation. News on the home page News is often the central element of intranet home pages, filling up the central area of

The intranet needs to have a strong brand, a sense of identity that, at a basic level, distinguishes it from the public website and other information sources within the organisation. Beyond this, the intranet brand should be designed to build staff trust, and to convey a clear sense of what the intranet can offer and when it should be used. This briefing explores the role of the intranet's brand identity, as well as outlining how to put it into practice. Lack of identity Too many intranets consist of nothing more than a collection of many different intranet sub-sites, published by

Staff should be able to confidently, quickly and accurately step from the home page of the intranet towards the information they require. If staff can't achieve this without resorting to search, the home page needs to be redesigned. As discussed in Full site redesign? Start by addressing the home page, many home pages fail because they are exclusively devoted to exposing new and useful content. Both of these have a place on a home page, but they should be kept in proportion with its role as a gateway to all site content. This article explains a quick and effective technique

Intranet discussion forums are an often used mechanism within organisations. While they are implemented using a variety of tools and technologies, they all serve the same basic purpose of supporting communication and discussion. In practice, however, many discussion forums fail to prosper, with few (if any) posts being made to them. In other cases, discussion groups are hailed as great successes. This article explores the differences between these experiences, and introduces two critical success factors for intranet discussion forums: a clear purpose, and a common community. Many names, same goal Intranet discussion forums may be called many things, including: bulletin

I recently finished an "information management and records management" review in a small public-sector agency. One of the findings was that while they needed a records management system (RMS), they couldn't proceed with the system they had due to its major usability problems. This accords my experiences in other organisations: notably that there has been a 100% failure rate of rolling out records management systems (with some exceptions, such as legal firms). In my earlier article, I identified three critical success factors: the system, classification scheme and message. Focusing on the system: records management systems are perfectly designed for their