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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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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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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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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17th August, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - No Comments
If you haven’t figured it out already, it’s a Google kinda world out there and your Intranet users expect your search functionality to provide them with accurate, relevant results to their search queries. With that in mind, if you haven’t already begun the process of building a federate search strategy, it’s time to do so.
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8th August, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - No Comments
Driving user adoption is one of the key challenges for any Intranet portal, but one of the most effective ways to ensure that your users are getting the most of your Intranet functionality is to ask them how they want to use it, observe how they actually use it, and either add/modify functionality to meet their needs or train them to use the portal better.
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29th July, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 2 Comments
Over the years, I have been privileged to work on a variety of Intranets ranging in shapes and sizes. Some were for large corporations, others were for small non-profits. Some were heavily governed, others were driven by user content. Even though each of these Intranets were unique in their own ways, they had one key element in common – strong user adoption. Without a strong user community that recognized the value of the Intranet, each would have failed.
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26th July, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - No Comments
When creating hyperlinks in your Intranet portal or social media application, it’s important to know when to create a link that reuses the existing browser session and when to open a new browser.
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2nd April, 2009 - Posted By Dan Kneeshaw - 1 Comment
The issue of “Governance” seems to always be one of the popular topics at Intranet Portal conferences. It is also a frequent point of discussion within the Intranet professionals group of which I am a member. As an introduction to the concept of Governance I simply want to focus on providing a little clarity around »
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