Intranet professionals often ask questions of their peers in the hope that the experience of others can provide a starting point for planning and inspiration.

Common questions

For those new to intranets there is certainly immediate value in exploring the most valuable core intranet tools such as great people directories, easy to find support services like HR, and a search function that returns useful results. However, answers to other common questions can be more challenging to implement.

Many of the common questions encountered include:

What is the best governance model?
Who should own the intranet?
How much will an intranet cost?
What is the best technology to use?
Which technology tools should we deploy?

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by admin 267 days, 5 hours ago

Intranets are increasingly being owned and managed by communications teams or business areas. In general, this is a positive shift, leading to greater alignment with staff and organisational priorities.

However, the move away from IT ownership, can leave intranet teams with a significant knowledge and skills gap relating to technology. In this technology-dominated world, is this viable or sustainable? Can intranet teams do without technical knowledge?

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 267 days, 6 hours, 49 minutes ago

Let’s face it: Professional communicators are dealing with an unprecedented pace of change.

Technology is the most obvious provocateur. Over the past few decades, professional communicators have borne witness to astounding technological change—the rise of the Internet, the empowerment of consumers through social media, the adoption of mobile devices, the emergence of new media channels, and the increasing influence of social media. Each has had an impact on our view of communication and the way we approach our audiences.

Source: www.iabc.com Posted by bee 446 days, 5 hours, 40 minutes ago

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. As such, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

Source: www.marketwatch.com Posted by support 571 days, 5 hours, 33 minutes ago

The intranet provides many different sources of information and opportunities for staff to do their jobs better. Whether an intranet has a news, content or task and activity focus, it should provide a seamless user experience. Users should not have to know or care whether a given application is truly part of their intranet, as long as it works as if it is.

Some common applications allow staff to:

• process pay and leave submissions
• log support calls with IT help desk
• order uniforms.

Other more complex applications may:

• calculate superannuation termination payouts
• stock levels of exhaust pipes in the factory in Brazil.

Applications can be:

• fully integrated
• stand-alone
• provide front ends to back end databases.

While applications are sometimes developed by intranet teams, they are more often developed by other IT teams or external software vendors. Intranet teams may have little influence on how these applications are built.

This article outlines some opportunities to work across the organisation and improve the overall experience for staff.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 602 days, 18 hours, 19 minutes ago

An intranet is an internal, secured business environment with the potential to make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your business.

For many small to medium businesses (SMBs), a company intranet is often seen as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a fundamental asset.

Companies that build an intranet often do so with limited ambitions, focusing predominantly on passive community and content based features such as internal notice boards and discussion forums.

Source: www.businesswings.co.uk Posted by support 621 days, 16 hours, 50 minutes ago

On a high level, we made a strategic bet with Socialtext Connect that an embrace of Open Web standards and REST APIs will make it easier for companies to integrate their traditional systems with social applications.

Source: www.socialtext.com Posted by support 622 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes ago

This post describes a proposed solution design for providing an intranet collaboration farm capable to scale out to support a publishing portal and extranet collaboration with partners and suppliers.

The design is based on a set of diverese sites types identified in an Information Architecture analysis, and the general planning recommendations for these types. In addition, several non-functional requirements is accounted for in the design, such as farm robustness and availability.

Source: kjellsj.blogspot.com Posted by support 690 days, 17 hours, 32 minutes ago

Social media has evolved from distracting fun to hype to significant mainstream adoption over the last 18 months or so. Will the intranet remain unaffected by this? Or are there any emerging signs from intranets in social businesses that could provide some clues to what the future is likely to bring? Consumer organisations such as BMW, BT, Coca Cola, Red Bull, Virgin and WWF have invited their customers to participate in conversations and taken their usage of social media tools, such as blogs, Facebook,...

Social media has undeniably become a dominant phenomenon everywhere; yet most intranet experts continue to discount it as simply a collection of interesting features and emerging technologies with little relevance. Social media is indeed much more. Notably, some progressive social businesses are going out of their way to facilitate culture change through increased employee participation using mature, “enterprise-friendly” technologies.

Source: www.jboye.com Posted by support 732 days, 4 hours, 46 minutes ago

There is no doubt, we have a love-hate relationship with email. As much as we say we would like to ditch this modern millstone, there is plenty of evidence to show that email remains entrenched in the information workplace as a core communication tool.

Worldwide email traffic continues to grow at an enormous rate and is now measured in billions of messages per day. This trend is also reflected inside organisations, where according to Gartner Research it is typically growing at a rate of 30% each year.

However, these numbers only tell one side of the story. Access to corporate email might be common place, but opinion remains divided about its effectiveness. As the volume of email has increased, so have the complaints about information overload, the impact of poor communication and inefficient collaboration practices. In response to these issues, technologists have created more new tools that each promise to solve the email problem better than the last.

Source: www.headshift.com Posted by bee 742 days, 17 hours, 1 minute ago