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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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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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...
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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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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Post-Steve Jobs, there's been much about how Apple innovates differently, creating demand that didn’t exist before . On the surface, the implication is paradoxical:Apple is famous for usability but doesn't listen to users.In a great blog post, Jane McConnell made a knowingly-provocative comment on how this relates to intranets:"User research is not necessarily the best way to take your intranet to the next level....
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Managing the digital workplace brings some tough challenges and calls for a mixture of clear strategic thinking, combined with pragmatism about how employees respond to the changes you envisage. Most knowledge work does not happen within processes but is more free-form and people-focussed. The appeal of social tools in this context is that they are better adapted to this kind of work than enterprise workflow...
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When I run workshops on intranets, I sometimes put down cards on the floor labelled “HR”, “IT”, “Communications” etc. and ask people to stand on the card that reflects who sponsors their intranet. Typically there are clusters around Communications and IT, one on “Knowledge Management” and a few people that end up playing Twister trying to straddle multiple cards. Others merely sigh and shuffle over...
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