Sometimes, internal communication still seems to be too focused on big events and top-down messaging. A focus on corporate strategy, big events, mundane administration announcements and so on, leave the employee wondering what to do with this information, and consigning it to the ‘nice to know’ bucket....
Read More
[frame]This post is part of a series that looks at what’s changed from an intranet manager perspective, in particular things employees will notice and improvements for site and content owners.SharePoint 2013 SeriesIs SharePoint 2013 worth waiting for? SharePoint 2013 for intranet sites (this post) SharePoint 2013 social features SharePoint 2013 for collaboration SharePoint 2013 digital workplace and mobile (forthcoming) SharePoint 2013 governance, analytics and search (forthcoming) SharePoint 2013 user experience (forthcoming)See our summary webinar...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More