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

Time and time again in my workshops, I see the same issues come up regarding the role of IT and the ownership of intranets. This is expressed in phrases such as: "We handed the intranet back to the corporate communications team, and it was a disaster." "We've tried handing back sections of the intranet to the business, but they just aren't interested." "We can't get business areas to take responsibility for updating their own areas." "Once we delivered the intranet to the business, we've had real problems." These all reflect a fundamental mistake made by some IT areas, which boils

We’ve recently been doing some interesting knowledge management work with a large law firm, and I thought it would be interesting to share some of the process. We were called …

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When an intranet isn't working effectively, many organisations attempt to tackle the problem with a full-scale redesign of the site or the implementation of a content management system. But these major projects can create as many issues as they resolve: they are time-consuming to specify and implement they often involve the acquisition of new technology there is no guarantee they will address the real issues major IT projects don't have a good track record of being successful Rather than embarking on a major project at the first sign of trouble, consider tactical solutions such as the redesign of the home

Search is often the greatest source of frustration on intranets. Irrelevant results, hard to read results pages and 'untitled document' entries plague many intranet searches. With the size and scope of most intranets, search is a key tool used by staff to find information. While the expectation is that it should be quick and easy to find information on the intranet, this is often not the case. Beyond generating staff frustration, these problems can reduce trust and confidence in the search tool. More broadly, the issues with search may be having a significant impact on the usage of the intranet

There are generally-accepted principles of what it takes to be a good (or even great) presenter. One of these is to get out from behind the podium, to stand in front of (or amongst) the audience. To either project your voice, or to use a wireless microphone if the room is too large. Having spent a bit of time at several major conferences over the last month, I ask: why do all the rooms always have a podium for the speaker, or a table for the panel to sit behind? Conference organisers can do more to help people to be

When organisations are looking for a new content management system (CMS), the selection process is designed to evaluate all the offerings in the marketplace to find the product that is the best fit to the organisation's needs. Requirements are documented, and vendors asked to provide written responses, give demonstrations, and provide whatever other information is required. All of these activities are designed to assess the quality and effectiveness of the solutions on offer. What is rarely recognised, however, is that while we are evaluating vendors, CMS vendors are also evaluating us. Submitting a tender response While we are looking for

Organisations are looking for a wide range of capabilities when selecting a new content management system (CMS), and search is often one of the desired features. Almost every site requires a search tool, whether it