26th January, 2010 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - No Comments
As Intranet Professionals, think about whether your Intranet is being used to encourage new ideas. Do you have a campaign asking employees to behave like clowns? Do you have an idea center where employees can submit their ideas and vote on those that they feel would be valuable? Are your executives open to new ideas and are they actively encouraging innovation?
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13th December, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 1 Comment
The recent explosion of social media platforms coupled with the financial meltdown driving a need for operational improvement has left purchasers exploring low-cost open source options, which is driving commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors to rethink their licensing models. In addition, purchasers of Intranet software have started to expect expanded social media functionality and expanded options for licensing/hosting as Software as a Service (SaaS) becomes more popular. In this piece, we’ll focus on the new platforms available for Intranets and some of the options available to organizations to reduce internal costs and maintain system stability while ensuring that their users have access to a wide variety of features.
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27th November, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 1 Comment
As the centralized point of access to organizational information, your Intranet portal may also represent a potential security risk. This is especially true if your portal is accessible to employees via the Internet. If your Intranet authentication is tied to your Active Directory or LDAP, be sure to put policies in place that ensure that your employees change their passwords on a periodic basis. In addition, be sure to encourage (or require) employees to use “strong” passwords, that are comprised of a combination of alpha characters, numbers, symbols and mixed cases.
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3rd November, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 7 Comments
Over the last few years, the social media boom has forced Intranet portal vendors to rethink some of their licensing models and expand their feature functionality. “Traditional” intranet portals that are simply presentations layers with a back-end content management system just don’t cut it anymore. Instead, organizations want their employees to generate peer-to-peer content using 2.0 functionality like blogs, wikis, and tagging instead of relying on one-way messages from the top.
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1st November, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 1 Comment
Check out this list of 99 great Intranet resources that I added to my Intranet list on Twitter! If you’re looking for Intranet resources to follow, these are your folks!
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26th October, 2009 - Posted By Angela Cullen - 1 Comment
When developing your Intranet, it’s best not to develop in a vacuum. You may not be the best person to make decisions on how employees will use the intranet to do their job. Be sure to identify employees that will be involved in the maintenance of the portal and get everyone involved in the design process. Create an Intranet Governance Council that will include at least one member from each department throughout your company. Bigger departments might have 2 or 3. Let the members of the governance council represent their department and tell you what employees in their department need to be able to do their job more efficiently.
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21st October, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - No Comments
The reality is that organizations are generating more and more information on an hourly basis. Take a moment and think about all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, voice mails, and sticky notes you generated on a daily basis just 3 years ago. Now, add modern day blogs, tweets, text messages, forum posts, comments, status updates, videos, podcasts, and wiki posts to your list and what do you get? More information? Definitely! But the larger problem is the fact that the information is now spread out in more places, making it harder for other employees and customers to find it.
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13th October, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 2 Comments
Regardless of whether you are a seasoned Intranet Professional or just getting started with your first Intranet design, I highly recommend adding What Every Intranet Team Should Know by James Robertson of Step Two Designs to your library. At 110 pages, this handbook packs a wealth of valuable information into a quick-read offering a background understanding of the evolution of Intranets, guidance on identifying the needs of your organization, and useful tips on designing a solution that meets those needs.
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27th September, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 1 Comment
Imagine, for a moment, that you have accepted a new position as a corporate executive tasked with figuring our how to make your company work better, faster, cheaper. Along with the details of your position, you have been informed that you have access to a wealth of competitive intelligence, product experience, and innovative thinking at your fingertips. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?
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20th September, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 4 Comments
Building a great Intranet environment is often about balance. Balancing acts like those between openness and security, corporate needs and individual desires, and the balance between content and culture often make for long meetings and tough decisions. Internal communicators and Intranet managers often have to determine how much to share and the right format in which to share it.
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