The primary purpose of intranets is to support staff in doing their jobs, to help them complete common business tasks. In practice, however, this can be very frustrating on many intranets. Policies are located in one section, procedures in another section, and forms in a third. Information then needs to be hunted out in order to complete even simple activities. The effectiveness of intranets can be greatly enhanced by bringing together all of the information and tools relating to a task or a subject, and presenting them in a single location. This is the basis for the "all together" rule

Consulting isn’t an easy business. While the consultant is often employed to assist with delivering a great project, this can quickly run into challenges and roadblocks. For example, the goal …

A few weeks ago, I participated in an intranet conference in Sydney. One of the speakers was Cushla Dawson from Air New Zealand, and she talked about a question that …

Much can be done to improve the quality of search results. No amount of tweaking of metadata or search configuration will, however, ensure that the most relevant results always appear at the beginning of the list. This is where search engine 'best bets' come in. These are a hand-created list of key resources for common queries, and they can dramatically improve the search experience, particularly on information-rich sites such as intranets. Presenting best bets In the screenshot shown, the staff member has searched for 'organisational structure'. The first section highlights the intranet page 'CSIRO organisational structure'. Below that, the rest

Intranets serve a diverse range of users in organisations, from staff in head office to those in regional offices, or on the front line. These users are not all the same, and do not have the same needs, issues or environment. A key principle for intranet teams is therefore: you can't usefully deliver information to users that you haven't personally met. This article discusses the challenges in delivering information to all staff within an organisation, and outlining practical approaches that ensure efforts spent publishing intranet content are not wasted. Users are not the same There is no such thing as

I'm sitting in today on an intranet conference today, and I've now heard three different talks about improving content quality on intranets. In particular: developing content standards and guidelines industry standards and guidelines "inverted pyramid" writing style training intranet authors enforcing content standards I just don't care. I've written before than not all content needs to be of equal quality. More importantly, with all the challenges involved in delivering an effective intranet, is this really where we want to be focusing our efforts? When there are limited intranet resources, a too-small intranet team, and no content management system, should we

One of the greatest fears when selecting a new content management system (CMS) is that the vendor will go bust, leaving the purchaser without support or upgrades. While this is certainly an important risk to manage, more careful consideration must be made beyond just selecting a 'big' CMS vendor and hoping for the best. This briefing outlines the issues, and presents some potential approaches for mitigating the risk that your chosen vendor will not survive. Will your vendor go bust? As indicated above, one risk that needs to be considered when selecting a CMS vendor is that they may not

Many organisations are attempting to clarify the relationship between the corporate intranet, and their document/records management system. While this is a broader issue of information management with an organisation, there are some short-term activities that can be taken to create a working relationship between these two platforms. This briefing outlines a simple scenario in which the intranet helps staff find key corporate information, while the documents accessed are stored in the document/records management system. Usage scenario The following scenario outlines one of the typical ways an intranet is used: A staff member browses into the HR section, and then to

When planning improvements to an intranet, two main approaches can be taken: the 'big bang' and evolutionary approaches. The big bang approach involves making a single, site-wide change to the design and structure of the intranet as the old site is replaced by a new one. In contrast, the 'evolutionary' approach makes gradual changes over time, evolving the capabilities and design of the current intranet. This article discusses the differences between the big bang and evolutionary approaches to intranet development. Guidelines are provided on when to use each approach, along with a range of practical tips and suggestions. Is it

A little while back, I wrote an article that suggested that in some cases workflow is the wrong solution within content management systems (CMS). This week I've been sitting in on four different vendor demos, as part of helping a client to select a CMS. One of the issues that came up strongly was the problems and limitations of workflow. Their needs are simple, and can be best summarised in the following scenario: There is a single centralised author who publishes content to the corporate website. Most of this information has already been signed off by legal, or publicly released