IntranetLounge

We know teams are the way to get things done, but it’s hard to collaborate when we’re geographically dispersed. Working together at a distance seems to cry out for technology, but which one? I thought I’d ask a bunch of smart IT guys about it. After all, they have teams trying to get work done too. Here’s some of what I heard from the experts at the LinkedIn group, CIOs.com: Chief Information Officer Network

E-mail is still the default collaboration tool -- it’s familiar and effective to a point. It becomes unwieldy quickly, however, when more than a couple of people are involved. How often have you struggled to make sense of a long email thread with non-chronological messages crossing each other? When you use e-mail to send documents for comment, keeping track of versions gets crazy quickly. That’s when you say there must be a better solution. Naturally, Microsoft and Google appear, as if by magic, each with their own supporters...

Last week I closed the What are you doing with SharePoint? survey. My thanks to the 239 people who filled out the 3 minute, 3 question survey. It was much appreciated.

Here is the overall picture ... across industries, based on 239 responses...

BT (British Telecom) has benchmarked its intranet for the past 4 years with the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF). The 2010 benchmark results continue to demonstrate the BT's intranet is one of the top intranets in the world. Here are three ways its Intranet demonstrates global best practices.

BT’s intranet is benchmarked in four broad areas; strategy and governance; metrics and performance; communications and culture; design and usability.

The main aim is to find out where BT sets global best practice and where it can be improved. The assessment helps determine whether the intranet is meeting the needs of BT and people who use it.

Do the top developers for Google’s Android operating system use Blackberries? Do the IT guys developing Windows 7 use Macs? Do the folks at WordPress use Blogger to host their personal blogs?

These are purposely ridiculous questions – wouldn’t the best developers use the actual tools they’re responsible for building? Wouldn’t they do their job more effectively if they were actually a user of the product they’re developing? Doesn’t the product have more credibility if the people behind it are believers in the product’s features? Out of everyone, shouldn’t the development team, at least, be the biggest advocates of the very software they’re implementing? Shouldn’t they be the ones drinking the Kool-Aid?

A week ago, I wrote an article for CMS Wire on The Long Hill for Enterprise Collaboration. Normally I put an announcement at the top of my blog sharing the link, but I wanted to write this post, and I’ve just been a tad busy…

You should read the article before proceeding much further. In the article, I talk about the challenges facing the adoption of collaboration tools, an important one being the desire to perform one activity in one interface.

Email is a classic example because, for all its faults, you can collaborate with anyone with an email address. People will tend to stick with one tool and not keep switching unless they are the "stopper" that is always on a mission to convert people to the good of collaboration platforms.

We're seeing more social media techniques and approaches entering the enterprise, from Saleforce.com's Chatter to the forthcoming beta of HP's 48Upper. The trend is undeniable. A recent Trend Micro survey reveals social media use in the workplace has risen from 19 percent to 24 percent in the last two years.

Strategies to resist the socialization of the enterprise may be futile. So Metastorm is suggesting enterprises embrace it, using tools that foster rather than squash social productivity in the workplace.

Recently we have launched a media player on our employee intranet, myAdworks. This has been developed and launched to provide a platform for showcasing videos that have been produced around the business. It will give us a chance to showcase our internal video recording and production skills to the rest of the business.

With lots of buzz surrounding intranet design, Bitrix decided to conduct a quick survey among its customers and determine their real-life preferences. We polled 32 organizations ranging from 100 to 2000 users and got rather interesting results. The direct answer to this post’s title is that they certainly do. The unexpected thing is that they do it in a very specific manner.

Every company operating on a global basis is interested in having all their employees worldwide identify with the company Many companies use an “Intranet” web site for this purpose. But oftentimes, the design can be flawed, and even lead to disconnects with global employees. Do you think the design of your intranet makes employees worldwide truly identify with your company?

Let me set the stage: The intranet affects all employees in all countries, not just the headquarters location. Close your eyes and try to put yourself in your employees’ shoes. Next, go to your company’s intranet and see it through their eyes.

Simplicity and the Enterprise

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward. With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.