Intranets have always straddled multiple functions, but with the growth of the digital workplace, balancing what is in and out of scope for an intranet is getting trickier. Often related initiatives such as SharePoint, Yammer, mobile access or BYOD risk confusing employees, but are not necessarily within the remit of the intranet manager to set their strategy. Here we present five guiding principles for that balancing act: 1. Don't Plan Your...
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It’s good to learn from your mistakes, but it’s much cheaper to learn from someone else’s.With this in mind, here’s a summary of 10 worst practices that I’ve seen as an intranet consultant and manager over the years. What strikes me is that, even as technology has moved on and trends such as social media and the ‘consumerisation of IT’ have risen, the fundamentals of...
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With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft introduced some very flexible tools for representing metadata on intranets. However, getting value from this requires that business units take ownership of it, and the available documentation tends to focus on the "how" rather than the "why".ClearBox therefore presented a workshop at IntraTeam 2012 on SharePoint Metadata: What Business Users Need to Know. Sharepoint metadata workshop from Sam Marshall [frame] Want to...
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Communication vs. CollaborationImagine if you are going to buy a new sofa, and instead of entering a showroom you are taken straight into the workshop. Inside there are rolls of fabric, wooden frames of part-built sofas, others that look nearly finished but you can’t quite tell. You pick out one that you like only to be told that it’s last year’s model and no longer...
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[caption id="attachment_805" align="alignright" width="150"] photo by Roy Blumenthal[/caption]Introducing the Phantom - a character created for the social network at LexisNexis UK and vividly described by Laurie Hibbs at the Melcrum Digital Workplace Summit this week.The Phantom is an online avatar that joins their internal Yammer discussions and is able to say what many think but few would post. He tells people who post trivial comments to the...
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Many people are boldly doing 2012 predictions, which is nice guesswork if you can get it. I’m going to stick to more certain ground and talk about the 10 things that stood out for me in 2011.1) Intranets remained stubbornly not dead. There seemed to be a rash of articles by people writing headlines “The Intranet is Dead” and then saying why it wasn’t. Unfortunately...
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Blending Top-Down and Bottom-Up How should how traditional intranet and social intranet approaches co-exist? Many organisations have invested heavily in highly structured and well governed intranets, but they also struggle to get regular, widespread content contributions. A social approach offers the promise of higher engagement levels and more dynamic content, but such tools are often introduced in tension with the existing intranet. This leads to concerns...
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One of the questions I increasingly encounter with intranet governance is when to use team sites (collaboration areas) and when to use publishing sites (‘intranet’ pages). It's important to be clear about when somethign is still work-in-progress and you want people to make changes (collaboration), and when it is a product that you are disseminating (communication).A variant is when to put content on a department...
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At the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen earlier this year, the ever-popular debate about how much news should feature on your intranet homepage was given another outing. There are other variants such as “who should own the intranet?” and “should we have one intranet or several?”.Like relatives at Christmas, these pop up periodically, hang around too long and leave you with a headache.One of the reasons...
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