Our next IBF Live is all about non-profit intranets and we have two live tours lined up for you: - Wendy Jordan, Internal Communications Coordinator at Glasgow Housing Association (GHA), will be joining us. GHA is one of the largest social landlords in the UK, with more than 50,000 tenants and 26,500 factored homeowners across Glasgow. The association is a not-for-profit company created in 2003 by the then Scottish Executive for the purpose of owning and managing Glasgow’s social housing stock. GHA’s stated aim is to provide better homes, better lives and a better Glasgow through providing warmer, safer and drier homes in safer, cleaner and more attractive communities. - Elkie Wills is the Senior Communications Analyst at San Diego Humane Society and SPCA. Serving San Diego County since 1880, the San Diego Humane Society and SPCA provides vital services to animals and people alike. A private non-profit organization, receiving no government grant funding, it is supported solely by contributions, grants, bequests, investments, proceeds from its retail outlets and some fees for service.

Source: www.ibforum.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 177 days, 7 hours, 36 minutes ago

ed under: Conferences & presentations, intranet innovation awards This year, the highlight of the 2012 Intranet Innovation Awards was being able to hand over all but one of the Awards to the winners in person. This involved travelling around the globe, as well as running a big Awards event in Melbourne, Australia.Australia Ross Pavey sharing details of his Award-w...

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by admin 182 days, 22 hours, 45 minutes ago

Some companies just don’t need fancy social tools to make their intranets effective; what works is what employees need. “Intranets hold up a mirror to the culture they serve.” That’s the ideal, anyway, James Robertson, managing director at Step Two Designs, told the hosts of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s monthly IBF Live broadcast this week. Each year, Step Two judges intranets from companies around the globe in its Intranet Innovation Awards. Robertson said the judging panel isn’t particularly interested in whether something “is just a cool idea.”

“It’s the value that it’s all about,” he said.

Source: www.ibforum.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 189 days, 23 hours, 7 minutes ago

If you want something to work properly in an organisation, you give someone responsibility for it. You don’t leave it to chance and simply hope that it gets done. Companies would never dream of not having someone in charge of legal, or communications, or widget production, so why is it that so many organisations are leaving enterprise collaboration inappropriately managed?

Many an intranet expert has waxed-lyrical on the core characteristics of an intranet. Interact Intranet proposed a simple three-way model of communication, business process and collaboration; James Robertson of StepTwo spoke eloquently in his talk “Intranets that delight and amaze” about the need to make things simpler and to connect people; and we’ve also proposed our own top 10 characteristics.

Source: intranetizen.com Posted by admin 194 days, 22 hours, 28 minutes ago

All intranet managers have found themselves on a roller coaster ride in recent years when it comes to justifying budget and selling plans for development – none more so than those in the public and third sectors.

But is a new impetus growing for intranets in these sectors? Back in 2010 I attended an IBF meeting of UK public and third sector intranet managers – we called it “Digital Momentum in the Public Sector”. We were right at the start of harsh budget cuts which were already having a significant impact on plans to develop and even just maintain intranets. Intranet managers were struggling with many of the same issues we see in the private sector: ■Supporting collaboration ■Meeting the expectations of increasingly digital savvy users ■Implementing SharePoint ■Providing seamless user experience ■Pioneering the digital workplace beyond the intranet

Source: www.ibforum.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 195 days, 11 hours, 50 minutes ago

There’s a conference being held in a few days and one of its features is Do you have the best intranet homepage? This got me thinking and I had a look at some sample homepages from ‘award winning intranets’ and, to be honest, I felt vaguely depressed. It took me a while to figure out why, which I did with the help of one of Jakob Nielsen’s posts from a few years ago. It showed a composite image of ten intranet homepages which showed a strong commonality and the most recent ones don’t look much different.

It has been claimed that the homepage reflects the whole intranet, if that is so then all intranets are overly complicated and stuff content packages that have no relevance to each other into a big bag labelled ‘intranet’.

Source: patrickcwalsh.wordpress.com Posted by admin 200 days, 21 hours, 11 minutes ago

DWF has asked me to write a research paper on the current state of the user experience of the Digital Workplace. Whoa there Einstein! Too many words, not making any sense, all put together. OK fair enough, so there’s the Digital Workplace… Which is what exactly? OK good point, and a good question. Well, you know how you’ve got the physical workplace—offices and such—you can consider the Digital Workplace as the sum of all the IT you might have access to as an employee. Your computer, your smartphone, and all the applications you use to do your job, the company intranet, etc. And now we’ve got access to all of these ways to communicate and work people can be more mobile and flexible in the way that they work, and they can work together in new and cool ways. But it is not IT alone. Read on!

Source: www.dwforum.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 201 days, 6 hours, 17 minutes ago

This year was a real vintage for the Intranet Innovation Awards, the global competition run by Step Two Designs which is now in its sixth year. With over 80 entries (a leap of over 50 per cent on 2011) and many high quality entries, we were able to see that intranet teams are more professional and impactul than ever before. This made it exciting for us to sift through the submissions, as well as giving the judges the pleasant dilemma of trying to work out their favourite entry!

Although this year we decided not to give the Platinum award (there was no one entry which stood head and shoulders above the others), we were still able to declare...

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by admin 201 days, 22 hours, 34 minutes ago

Do you want to be an exceptional Intranet Manager who accomplish wonderful things and deliver a world class intranet? Then one of the most important things you have to do is “conquer” all areas of expertise involved in the intranet.

A while ago I heard an Intranet Manager saying “I have no clue about what our IT developers do”. While this is ok at low level coding activities (you do not have to know html language), it is NOT ok on a higher conceptual level. In my opinion you must understand what they do, how they are implementing your new intranet features, how this technically relates to the existing intranet and how they are solving your problems.

Source: jesperby.com Posted by admin 203 days, 23 hours, 26 minutes ago

The Evolution of the Intranet

If we sum it up succinctly, we could say the intranet as a "system" has progressed from a simple CMS for "internal websites", through more structured "publishing" of news and information, into the collaboration sphere, then into more "social" collaboration, until now with the introduction of terms such as digital workplace when we can say that the intranet is an ecosystem, or a complex system of systems.

As such your intranet may have many constituent parts, a Web Content Management system, a portal platform, a enterprise social business platform, a digital asset management system with internal or externally hosted streaming media servers, web interfaces to document management, ERP, HRM systems, the list goes on……..

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by admin 203 days, 23 hours, 16 minutes ago