The new SharePoint has been released as a public preview, along with hopes by the Microsoft team of “leapfrogging expectations” (see the launch blog post). Is it worth holding out for the full release? Do the new features make it compelling to those planning a social intranet?[frame]This post is the first of a series that looks at what’s changed from an intranet manager perspective, in particular...
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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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Microsoft to Buy Yammer - SharePoint Implications? It looks official that Microsoft will acquire Yammer. This has led to lots of speculation about why and what it means for intranets.I suspect that Microsoft are more interested in the user base than the technology, as this is pretty trivial to replicate, and they were already on that path with Office Talk. It may also be a more predatory...
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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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Day 3 from the IntraTeam ConferenceSee also: Day 1, Day 2 Sharon O'Dea - Mobile Intranet at UK Parliament Sharon (@sharonodea) wins my vote for the most entertaining session. She talked about the challenges of being an intranet manager in the unusual world of a near 1000-year old organisation. When she started there was an old intranet, but with elections coming and a new influx of younger, novice MPs, ...
Read MoreThis is part 2 of a day-by-day blog of Intrateam 2012See also: Day 1, Day 3 Tony Byrne - Latest Trends in Collaboration and Social Computing Within Larger Enterprises Tony (@TonyByrne) of the Real Story Group (RSG) began by saying: If you throw in blogs, wikis etc. at the organisation and people don't use them, it's not an adoption problem, it's a technology strategy problem; you haven't...
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Here is a quick checklist that you can use to rate your phone book 'maturity'.Count your points for the following: 1) 1 Point if all your employees are in one phone book 2 bonus points if contractors are too 2 bonus points if you have supplier contacts 2) 1 Point if all employee data comes from a master source 2 bonus points if you have a process to check accuracy (e.g. when...
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I'm at IntraTeam 2012 in Denmark and will be blogging my take on the highlights (apologies to the speakers in tracks I miss).see also: Day 2, Day 3Today's pre-conference workshops featured: Jim Ylisela on Writing for the Internal Web Jim (@jpyjr) reckons our employees are getting rapidly cynical as intranet content falls behind web content; it's boring, not interactive, words not video.For articles, nobody follows the Who,...
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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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Last week I was invited to join Melcrum’s Social Media group to discuss how the growth of social media impacts the function of internal communications. It was a very lively debate and what follows is my take on the topic, updated, based on what I learned that day (I was actually billed to do a ‘download’ but the irony of a one-way presentation on social...
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