As a fundamental purpose of intranets, communication has a vital role to play in the ongoing development and success of a site. But understanding how an intranet can perform as a useful communication platform is often lacking.

This article will explore three types of communication that can be found or deployed on an intranet. There are many others too.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 753 days, 23 hours, 39 minutes ago

Web content is the meat in the sandwich, not the icing on the cake. Too often, organizations build websites and then neglect the content, letting it languish, unread and unloved. Even during website redesigns, the editorial process gets short shrift in favor of building shiny new features and creating fancy new designs. Thinking about the content is always left until the last minute, always thought to be “somebody else’s problem.”

Ever wonder why so many websites feature dense, unreadable prose? Force you to navigate through pages of brochure copy and legalese? Look like they backed up a truck full of PDFs and dumped them in the content management system?

No content strategy, that’s why.

Source: interactions.acm.org Posted by bee 756 days, 16 hours, 53 minutes ago

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on the essentials for social computing and collaboration for business. The first of those essentials was a recommendation to have a maniacal focus on garnering adoption. As I speak with customers around the world, I find that an increasing number of companies are struggling with the mechanics of how to accelerate adoption of the social computing capabilities they’ve made available to the enterprise. Worse yet, many are apprehensive about moving forward with some of the truly transformative ways to use social computing because they fear that their organizations are more conservative than most, and their users are probably not going to be up for using these cutting-edge ways of interacting and collaborating.

While these seem like perfectly reasonable objections, accelerating adoption is possible in the most conservative of user bases. Here are a few ways to do so in your organization.

Source: blog.pateljeetu.com Posted by JennyWilliams 767 days, 18 hours, 30 minutes ago

Video interview from Denmark on the future of intranets

This is a video recorded at the IntraTeam event in Denmark at the start of the trip, discussing “intranets in 2015″.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 770 days, 5 hours, 45 minutes ago

Recently I highlighted and reviewed a report by Frost & Sullivan which talked about the impact of collaboration on overall business performance. The report was created a few years ago and was thus slightly dated. Fortunately someone from Verizon sent me a more updated version of the report, this one was conducted in 2009 and provides more insight and information into how businesses are collaborating and how effective that collaboration actually is.

The new report talks much more about UC&C or Unified Communications and Collaboration and also introduces ROC or return on collaboration. As with the previous report, there is no mention of Enterprise 2.0 anywhere, just collaboration. Let’s dive right into it.

Source: www.jmorganmarketing.com Posted by bee 770 days, 23 hours, 5 minutes ago

Why is it that we are not that good at collaborating then, in the first place? Well, probably we have never been taught how to. And, maybe, we should.

Needless to say that in today’s corporate world, collaboration is, indeed, now more important than ever. In the era of the Knowledge Economy, it can’t be otherwise. It’s no longer even a choice. For the business, nor for knowledge workers. It’s an imperative. Actually, I would go even further: a matter of pure survival.

Source: www.elsua.net Posted by bee 770 days, 4 hours, 24 minutes ago

Web customers care about tasks, not goals

By Gerry McGovern

Talking about customer goals is the biggest mistake a website can make. That's how you lose the impatient customer.

A couple of months ago we needed to find a new house cleaner. I went to lots and lots of house cleaner websites and became more and more frustrated. The typical website had a big silly picture of someone smiling out at me.

Hello marketers. Anybody home? Can you please, please get over the jaded, print marketing, old school hero shot. It's the Web. It's the 21st Century.

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by bee 771 days, 19 hours, 38 minutes ago

There was a story not too long ago where a municipality in Denmark had lost it’s intranet. Somebody in IT managed to delete the entire intranet by accident and they couldn’t find a working backup copy. Talk about a bad day, right? Not really according to the public statement that was made after the incident. The responsible senior manager stated that the loss of the intranet will have absolutely no impact on the operations of the municipality, their citizens, or any other external related work.

Now, if that is indeed the case - why did they have an intranet in the first place?

Source: www.intranetlife.com Posted by Daan 775 days, 18 hours, 19 minutes ago

This week I’ll share with you five relatively easy, yet very effective methods you can utilize to ensure that your intranet is seen as delivering value, as well as turning your senior managers into believers as well.

V.A.L.U.E.

V. Different people look at value in different ways. While we won’t go into debating the definition of value itself here, we need to establish that any value delivered through your intranet should be viewed in the context of your company’s business goals, strategy and deliverables. While this might sound like: “Doh! Everybody knows that...” we very often fall into the trap of labeling the wrong things as ‘intranet value’. Or in some cases - double counting that value.

Source: www.intranetlife.com Posted by bee 776 days, 16 hours, 23 minutes ago

Social networking, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools on intranets are snagging all the attention as enterprises try to breathe new life into their corporate portals. But the bricks and mortar still count. Ignoring intranet design best practices can spell death for even the most application-rich portals.

"The myth is that it's OK if you just reflect the way the company is put together," said Tim Walters, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, who recently authored the research note Five Myths That Hobble Your Intranet. "That [stance]… is almost bound to deliver a site structure that's a lost cause."

Source: searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com Posted by bee 776 days, 16 hours, 46 minutes ago