The game is changing and there’s a major shift happening in the way we design websites. I’ve been in endless meetings with heated discussions over website or intranet navigation and information architecture. Should the navigation be aligned following departmental structures, product lines or copied from the competitors?

Once the navigation has been decided, the actual implementation often turns out to be complex and expensive. Subsequently, online analytics has unfortunately shown that the navigation is...

Source: jboye.com Posted by admin 138 days, 2 hours, 50 minutes ago

Over the last few months a number of very interesting reports and surveys have been published, and in this post I have provided some brief reviews of them.

‘Big Data’ is emerging as an important topic. The McKinsey Global Institute have published a superb report on the challenges and opportunities of Big Data. The title says it all. “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity“. The report is 156pp long. After chapters on Growth and Value Creation and then Big Data Techniques and Technologies there are detailed assessments of how Big Data could transform the health care and retail sectors in the USA, public sector administration in the EU and manufacturing and personal location on a global basis. One of the most interesting tables in the report is the scale of information storage by vertical industry sector in the USA, showing that companies with more than 1000 employees typically have over 100 terabytes of stored data, and in many cases substantially more.

And 4 more...

Source: www.intranetfocus.com Posted by bee 161 days, 3 hours, 9 minutes ago

The search functionality is critical to allowing users to find information quickly and efficiently. However, many organizations do not consider the inner workings of their intranets' search, which results in users' frustration over not being able to find what they are seeking.

One of the most important attributes of an intranet is the ability to contain the organization’s wealth of data needed for daily operation in one single location. However, holding the data in a single place is of no use if the employees who need that data are not able to locate what they require.

Source: www.prescientdigital.com Posted by admin 239 days, 2 hours, 58 minutes ago

Search has been a hot topic in the intranet space for a long time. Why can’t I find what I’m looking for inside the company, just like with Google on the Internet. Martin White’s breakout at the Intranet Conference (Congres Intranet) was about this topic and want to help us improve intranet search.

White started out by asking which search engine we used. A long list of search platforms is mentioned, ranging from open source search technology to Sharepoint search. Not many participants have the same engine.

This illustrates one of the points White wanted to make. Search isn’t easy. It not easy on the internet, and it’s hard on the intranet as well. He shows how different the search results are. This is not helpful for users and it makes search unnessissararily complex. This is one of the reasons user go for the easiest route on the internet: just use Google.

Source: info-architecture.blogspot.com Posted by JennyWilliams 318 days, 9 hours, 43 minutes ago

Explains how you can improve the way staff find information on the intranet by provindg a structured context around information types.

Source: cibasolutions.typepad.com Posted by roowright 340 days, 6 hours, 44 minutes ago

Enterprise search is often deployed as ‘the answer’ for the difficulties of finding information across an entire organisation. The basic concept is that the enterprise search indexes ‘everything’, and findability problems are solved.

In practice, teams given the task of designing and deploying enterprise search find these projects much more complex. Many questions need to be answered:

• Which information sources should be indexed?
• How should the results be presented?
• What functionality should be provided for staff?

To answer these questions, teams need a clear vision of the desired end state, including an understand of staff needs and tasks.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by support 451 days, 13 hours, 20 minutes ago

Honestly, metadata is really, really boring. But hey, metadata is extremely useful.

Without good metadata, we can’t really solve the findability problems we have on our intranet. In order to give the right person, the right information, at the right time, at the right place and in the right way, we must use metadata extensively.

Or to be more precise, we must use master metadata. In this post I’ll try to explain how we mandate the use of metadata without making it a barrier for publishing information.

Source: sys64738.se Posted by support 472 days, 14 hours, 28 minutes ago

Information management agility is about being able to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. But what if there's just so much information that we are caught in a battle trying to find the things that are relevant to achieve our goals? There is a way to get past this information overload and improve findability.

We’ve been hearing about the problem of information overload for years now. The exponential growth of information within our organizations is deemed as so problematic that it negatively affects employee productivity and ultimately results in increased levels of operational costs as a result of an inability to easily sift through it all.

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by support 493 days, 1 hour, 47 minutes ago

There are many ways to get to content on the intranet: navigation, cross links, tags, via employee profiles and... search.

Most of us use Google to search on the internet and we are quite happy with the returned results. But often we are not so happy with the search in the intranet. Intranet search is still a feature that leaves a lot to be desired in many organisations.  

Internet Search vs. Intranet Search

There is also a difference between search on the internet and the intranet. On the intranet you expect certain search results, because you know that the content is published on the intranet. You don't know the same thing on the internet. In other words you won't miss it in the search engine result page. People are more critical with intranet search results.

This article contains some lessons I learned implementing search in an intranet with the Google Search Appliance.

There are four main areas in which the intranet search can be improved:

• Improve the search interaction
• Provide a great user interface
• Write good quality content for the web and improve the quality of the indexed data
• Monitor and evaluate the search

Source: www.baszurburg.com Posted by BasZurburg 502 days, 12 hours, 28 minutes ago

We have a "family" of intranets and we use Google Search Appliance for our search engine.  The quality of search results varies widely across the different intranets.

To demonstrate the difference in quality, I tested a one-word search which was the name of a project I wanted to find out about.

Let's call it ProjectX.

Source: intranetdiary.blogspot.com Posted by support 513 days, 13 hours, 27 minutes ago