Is It Time For Your Intranets Annual Performance Review?

8th July, 2010 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 8 Comments

It never ceases to amaze me how few people trust their organizational intranets. A tool that was designed specifically for the purpose of helping employees do their job better and faster is often the joke of the water cooler. Yet organizations knowingly ignore the fact that employees don’t use or trust the information stored on their intranet.

Periodically, I have the great opportunity to sit in front of a group of employees and ask them about their intranet experiences. Often, it’s in anticipation of an intranet revamp, so the need for a “do-over” or an evolution has already been defined at some level. While the individual users and comments might be different, they usually go start with something like this:

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99+ Great SharePoint Resources – Sean’s SharePoint Twitter List

10th January, 2010 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 2 Comments

Continuing with my posts on great Twitter resources, this is a followup to my 99 Great Internal Comms Resources, 99 Great Intranet Resources and 99 Great ECM Resources posts. Below is a link to my list of 99+ great SharePoint Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who tweet about SharePoint as an Intranet platform, ECM solution, and a collaboration tool…these are your folks! Pay careful attention and you may see folks who are also providing links to some valuable SharePoint alternatives, as well.

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Is ECM Going The Way Of The Dodo? Or Maybe The Way Of The Intranet?

20th December, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 12 Comments

Is Enterprise Content Management going the way of the Intranet and becoming an outdated notion? Will better federated search technologies negate the need for a central repository? Are organizations better off investing in the functional elements of ECM like document management, records management, and business process management instead of buying the whole enchilada?

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Document Management vs. Content Management vs. Knowledge Management Part 2 – Understanding Content Management

31st May, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 2 Comments

In the second article in this series, we’ll focus on understanding Content Management and how it differs from Document Management and Knowledge Management. If you recall from the first article in the series, Document Management is all about how we create, manage, route, retain, and destroy the container that we refer to as a document. Content Management, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the information stored inside that container and how you can effectively add/edit/delete the information in the document.

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Document Management vs. Content Management vs. Knowledge Management Part 1 – Understanding Document Management

4th April, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 1 Comment

Document Management, Content Management, and Knowledge Management are three very nebulous terms that get thrown around a lot when discussing the functionality and requirements of an Intranet. Unfortunately, concrete definitions of these terms are hard to come by since the terms often mean different things to different organizations. In an effort to build a common understanding of the terms, let’s break down each of the terms and look closely at how they inter-relate. The first article in this series focuses specifically on Document Management.

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Intranet Portal Requirements In The Age Of Social Media

30th March, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 8 Comments

A few years ago, I was in charge of an RFP for a Fortune 500 company to select an Intranet portal application and portal content management system. Thinking about the requirements for that portal and how they would change in this age of social networking got me thinking about how the requirements would change if I were to conduct that same RFP today.

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“Do We Really Need An Intranet Portal?” – How Valuable Is The Technology You Represent?

15th March, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 3 Comments

How often do we question the technologies that our organization relies on? Are we trapped by legacy systems and users who are unwilling to adopt new solutions? Do these excuses keep us from asking “Why” we need a specific solution, is it useful, and is there a better alternative? This article looks at one such situation and provides some good justification for Intranet Portals.

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What Does Enterprise Content Management Really Mean?

10th March, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 2 Comments

Over the last few years, the term “Enterprise Content Management” (ECM) has become a term familiar to those working in the Intranet, Web, or Knowledge/Information Management sectors. The difficulty lies in the fact that, while the term is easy to toss around, the actual definition of what is expected to be encompassed by ECM continues to evolve. As a result, ECM to a Records Manager often means something very different than what ECM means to a Web Developer. In an attempt to more accurately define ECM, this article deconstructs the term into a variety of subcomponents that are commonly included in discussions about ECM.

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