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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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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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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22nd March, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - No Comments
One of the strengths of a good Intranet portal is the ability to integrate the disparate applications that exist within an enterprise. Just because links to the applications are presented in the portal or, in some cases, even natively surfaced in the portal doesn’t make them effectively integrated. Take a look at the following tips and see if they indicate that your portal has mashups or messes.
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