Working with global clients who need to communicate with employees around the world, I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the challenges of translation. This issue is not likely to go away any time soon as more companies see opportunities and set goals to grow their international business.

In this post advice on:

• Make sure mission-critical information is translated
• Create a quality-control process that ensures accurate translation
• Give employees the choice of language

Source: www.yourthoughtpartner.com Posted by admin 93 days, 2 hours, 5 minutes ago

This is the second installment of a series of articles on content management assessments.

Nearly all content management systems have flexible repositories that allow you to control how content is structured. This is important because every organization’s content is different just like every website is different. But this flexibility can also be a liability because it creates opportunity for bad design as well as good design. Content can be under-structured, over-structured, or wrongly structured. Asking the right questions will help you assess how effective your content was modeled.

• Do your contributors spend a lot of time formatting content?
• Do your content contributors feel like data the entry aspect is overshadowing the creative process?
• Do you frequently find yourself wishing for a global (as in site-wide) search and replace?
• Do content contributors find themselves duplicating the same text over and over again?
• Do content contributors overload or misuse content attributes?

Source: www.contenthere.net Posted by Helen79 323 days, 8 hours, 38 minutes ago

The job of the shelf-stacker is to fill the intranet shelves with junk. It's a fairly easy job. They don't have to think too much. It's not difficult to shove something on a shelf. They might stack it next to something similar, but it's not so important to them where it goes. Some of the shelf-stackers don't stack items with the labels facing the right way. As long as it's on a shelf.

They're not bothered whether a customer takes an item off a shelf, has a little look, or not. They don't mind if something has been sitting on a shelf for months and is out of date. That's not their job. Sales figures don't interest them. Top sellers? Supply and demand? Nah. In fact, most of the time, they don't even bother looking at what it is that they put up on the shelves. Someone gives them something to stack, and off they go. Job done. Box ticked.

Source: intranetdiary.blogspot.com Posted by bee 455 days, 2 hours, 14 minutes ago

The end is in sight

Remember that migration plan from phase 2?  Having decided to publish back-issues of news stories to the start of 2009, I could quantify how much content we would need to migrate.  I managed to cut the original content from 6416 entries down to 3000 entries.

Some of this was by losing older news stories. The remainder I did by reorganising content into simplified chunks.  Where a section had dozens of one-paragraph pages, I grouped and combined them into fewer pages.

Source: intranetdiary.blogspot.com Posted by bee 492 days, 12 hours, 45 minutes ago

Posted by Wedge

As more and more people within a company get directly involved with intranet publishing, more and more pages get published. While the content strategy should direct the quality and location of pages, there are going to be times when messages conflict with each other.

Information overload is a real risk if your strategy is to allow anyone / everyone to publish pages, documents, wikis and blogs on your intranet.

Source: kilobox.net Posted by bee 551 days, 3 hours, 38 minutes ago

I’m planning the launch of our new intranet. I need to engage hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, to get them to see the intranet as a work tool, not as a company news channel.

I’m (very) slowly going to make everyone able to publish stuff – and of course our people are not writers or web workers – the intranet isn’t their passion as it is mine.

I say “I” when of course it’s a massive IT project with dozens of stakeholders, but I’m the intranet manager so it falls to me to put voice to many a matter.

Source: kilobox.net Posted by bee 628 days, 3 hours, 2 minutes ago

Most organizations do not undertake a migration effort with the rigor and discipline that they normally would for a software project. The result is often a failed migration. You should treat a content migration project like any other major software project in terms of execution. What this means is that you should deploy a proper methodology for implementing migrations.

A typical software development methodology has the following phases at a high level:

• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Testing
• Deployment

Source: www.eiwatch.com Posted by bee 632 days, 2 hours, 46 minutes ago

According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”. For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation’s intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application.

It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet. Most organisations of any size will have a full-time web manager, often with a support team, but this is rarely the case with the intranet.

Source: www.ariadne.ac.uk Posted by support 664 days, 2 minutes ago