Everyone knows that intranets are a great way to collect and distribute information and content. But what types of content should the intranet distribute, and how does the content add value to an organization?

Research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) shows the most valuable intranets make it easier for employees to do their jobs.

Every organization has hundreds of decisions to make about the way it operates. These decisions combine together to form business activities and policies, and ultimately determine whether an organization will succeed. The most efficient way to disperse these practices is through an intranet.

An effective intranet is like the brain of an entire organization. It describes how a company functions and ensures that all employees sing from the same hymn book.

The following list of nine types of intranet content will help you carry out business tasks more effectively. Use this checklist to make sure your intranet is capturing and delivering content that will add value.

Source: www.ragan.com Posted by admin 157 days, 3 hours, 8 minutes ago

More and more people in an organization are getting involved in the intranet, more people are opening sites and publishing content. Managers are downloading easy-to-use tools and installing them on their own. The enthusiasm is very positive but the result is often confusing if not chaotic.

In 3 ways to bring coherence to the digital workplace I said that the the intranet manager has 3 tools to govern all this:

• A start page strategy, which I wrote about here tips for the digital workplace start page

• A global navigation bar or banner, anchoring the eco-system (see below)

• And a set of minimalist rules

This post is about the second: global navigation.

Source: netjmc.com Posted by bee 168 days, 1 hour, 22 minutes ago

People are on the Web to do something very specific. Great navigation relentlessly focuses on what is ahead.

"This website really annoys me," an engineer told me recently. "I click several times just to get to the product page, then I click on Version 4, and then several clicks later I click on Configuration and what happens? I'm back up at the main product support section. That's really annoying."

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by admin 293 days, 3 hours, 46 minutes ago

Communicators and content managers frequently fret over the challenge of 'feeding the monster'. The monster in question is the intranet; the food is 'content'.

One of the most frequent questions posed to me by communicators and content managers is, “How often should we update our home page?” Hopefully this issue was largely addressed in pre-launch planning. Unfortunately, it is rarely given much more than passing thought until the monster goes live and the masses start stampeding to it for enlightenment. One solution to the hungry intranet challenge is to turn employees into journalists.

Source: www.prescientdigital.com Posted by bee 338 days, 3 hours, 5 minutes ago

As an intranet becomes more popular and contributions to the site increase, the number of pages, documents and articles and, subsequently, the number of results on search queries, grows exponentially. Sifting and sorting through this ever-growing information becomes more and more difficult.

In this article we’ll look at three intranets from the Intranet Innovation Awards that use metadata and taxonomies to provide classification systems and filtering options to help users drill down effectively and find what they’re looking for. This concept is far from new, and can be found on many public-facing websites and systems. Yet for intranets it’s become something of a lost art. Perhaps because of the complexity of designing such databases, or the general lack of sophistication of intranets themselves, relatively few sites offer such functionality.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by admin 344 days, 10 hours, 9 minutes ago

Since posting Content strategy: the essential link, a few people have asked what the difference is between content strategy and corporate communications strategy. Are they not the same?

The answer is no, certainly not. But the two are integral and complementary, rather like a Russian doll.

Neither a corporate communications strategy nor a content strategy has a set format. Outputs differ between organisations and strategists, especially while content strategy develops as a discipline.

Source: blog.drcc.co.uk Posted by support 390 days, 11 hours ago

'Content strategy' is a crucial concept in communications, but isn’t as arcane or abstract as you might fear.

Content strategy is about generating communications, information and reference materials that actually apply to what your company is trying to achieve.

It’s about meeting the needs of the audience and helping people get things done.

Source: kilobox.net Posted by bee 396 days, 2 hours, 19 minutes ago

Managing content can yield enormous rewards, but it requires a continuous improvement model.

I was recently testing a website with customers when a simple error became evident. I told the website manager about the error and he said they had already noticed it and would fix it in the next release. This was a basic error that should have been easy to fix. However, the website was being managed as a series of mini-projects. It will be over two months from the time the error was identified to the time it gets fixed.

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by support 433 days, 2 hours, 41 minutes ago

Jargon is generally language that applies to a particular trade, profession or group of people. Within organisations jargon can be like secret shorthand, with many variations, including abbreviations, made-up words and acronyms. Who has ever been on a Genesis project or had to go to a meeting in the CQ building?

The intranet can suffer and benefit from this collective organisational shorthand. Good intranet teams need to ensure any jargon used on top level pages such as home page and landing pages is appropriate.

For example, ‘Richard’s blog’ might be highly appropriate when it is owned by the CEO, often referred to and covered during induction training. On the other hand, ‘OSKA’ might be used as the name of the online training system based on the software used, and have no real relevance at all to staff.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by support 451 days, 13 hours, 50 minutes ago

It started with a card sorting study of a tourism website. On individual cards were tasks such as accommodation, vacation packages, planning a trip, top attractions, special offers, etc.

In workshops, I would go through a time-consuming process of getting people to put these cards into groups with the objective of helping this website design a more intuitive navigation. But the exercise was cumbersome and it was often hard to see clear results coming out of it.

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by admin 454 days, 1 hour, 12 minutes ago