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 336 days, 13 hours, 3 minutes ago

Where does your site’s best content come from? If you don’t know or if you’re producing it, there could be a problem. Diversifying your content’s sources is key to providing content that represents different perspectives about relevant topics. As well, by diversifying sources you can help facilitate a collaborative workflow.

But how can you begin to get others to create and share content? If your company already has an intranet or uses social collaboration tools such as Yammer for communicating, that’s a great start. You can simply put out an All Points Bulletin for specific content. However, if your company has a culture that isn’t yet conducive to sharing information with others, you might have to start with basic strategies.

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by JennyWilliams 341 days, 11 hours, 58 minutes ago

projects), but in reality most companies are doing some form of governance even if they don’t call it “governance”. Taken literally, to govern means to steer, and in general terms governance is the exercising of the required checks and balances to provide guidance to an organization, and maintain the correct course.

You will find that there will not be a “one size fits all” model that works for you. Some content on your intranet will demand very strict governance, but other information is more transient and does not require formal governance models to be in place.

Regardless of the level of governance that you need, there will be some common strategic imperatives that drive adoption of governance models...

Source: www.intranetlife.com Posted by JennyWilliams 357 days, 4 hours, 10 minutes ago

1. Don’t spend any time thinking about your site structure or navigation. Make it up as you go

2. Ask your boss or director what they think will work. They know best

3. Use exciting interesting words that are a bit ambiguous. The mystery will entice people to click

4. Better still – use ‘interesting’ pictures rather than words as navigation

5. People love to be patronised....

Read the full story for the complete list

Source: www.intranetjob.co.uk Posted by bee 415 days, 4 hours, 6 minutes ago

To put it simply, Collaboration 2.0 is Accenture’s Industrial Revolution: it has changed the way we work, learn, communicate and collaborate.

As director of social computing and collaboration, I’m amazed at how viral our social computing platform has become, creating one of the largest suites of enterprise social computing tools on the planet. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we put our people’s needs front and center in our approach to social media.

We first determined why we should add the capabilities (by examining which existing public tools were generating groundswell in our organization) and then determined how we should get there. And for us, the “we” encompasses a magnitude of 190,000 people across 120 countries.

Source: www.accenture.com Posted by support 413 days, 16 hours, 18 minutes ago

It's no longer cost effective to have a small team manage the content on your Intranet, you need to encourage contributions from the wider organization. Here are some approaches to do that.

Any one who builds or maintains Intranets will know the technology is only half of the puzzle. A good Intranet lives or dies by its content. In days gone by, generating and maintaining content required dedicated Intranet teams, devoted man hours and careful curation. All of these things required time and money to be invested, on top of whatever costs were incurred in the technology build.

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by support 413 days, 5 hours, 44 minutes ago

The bulk of intranets continue to be powered by off-the-shelf content management systems (CMSs) and portal solutions, but social intranet platforms are rapidly becoming a suitable and powerful alternative to bigger, more established software vendors.

It’s no surprise that the big, traditional technology behemoths of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle dominate the intranet vendor landscape. In fact, in recent years, the big three have gobbled-up or pushed-out smaller contenders (e.g. IBM buys Filenet; Oracle buys nearly everyone else) or have forced many others to merge (e.g. OpenText buys Vignette; Autonomy buys Interwoven) or shut them out of the business all together.

Source: www.prescientdigital.com Posted by bee 412 days, 3 hours, 26 minutes ago

One of the more confusing aspects of SharePoint is its Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities. Why is it confusing (at least for me)? Well, this is AIIM and we spend most of our time discussing information involving unstructured content as opposed to data.

And the BI world involves databases and data warehouses and OLAP cubes and other related buzzwords like EPM or business analytics. BI is really its own unique niche.

Leave it to Microsoft to build BI capabilities into SharePoint along with everything else and in the SharePoint 2010 wheel — it’s called “Insights”. Whatever you call it, the hidden value of SharePoint is its ability to manage data and content together.

Source: sharepointpmp.com Posted by support 432 days, 9 hours, 3 minutes ago

This is Part 7 of the “What Functionality and Content Should I Add to My Intranet” series.  To view previous parts of the series, click on Series link listed under pages on the right or use the link in the first sentence.

In my last post, I covered law firm intranet content for client pages.  This part of the series will focus on content for external users of...

Source: lawfirmintranet.com Posted by support 432 days, 8 hours, 56 minutes ago

Intranets are a tricky beast, they need to have an energized userbase and be welcoming to all members of a company. U.K.-based intranet software provider, Interact, shed some light on best practices when announcing its intranet award winners.

Intranets shouldn't just happen, that way lies chaos. Any reasonably sized company should have someone or a team in charge of identifying the target audience, what they need to achieve and creating the right tools for different segments. Also, someone has to set up the rules of conduct and governance to make sure users behave themselves.

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by support 431 days, 5 hours, 23 minutes ago