SharePoint Intranet trends & best practices 2011

Intranet Trends & Best Practices

2011 & Beyond

Intranets - The Evolution

Intranets 2011 - What to expect?

The Vision

Trends for Intranets 2011

Top 5 Features of Intranets 2011

Ageless Key features of Intranets

Why SharePoint 2010 for Intranets

Intranets 2011 - Best Practices

Building Intranets 2011 - The Process

Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

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Evolution of technology, intranet trends and concepts over time

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The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

The Continual Growth of Social Tools

Intranets 2011 will usher in the era where Social tools and applications take prominence and provide

organizations with an opportunity to connect better with their employees.

The social profile of users will begin to serve as resource hub – not only can employees connect with

other employees but disseminate information about themselves, their areas of interests and

achievements which will allow for greater employee recognition and understanding.

Employee generated content is taking prominence and with abilities like user tagging, social profiling,

“people” based content information and search has been enhanced.

Web 2.0 intranet will also greatly benefit the entire organization in terms of retaining enterprise talent

due to the open nature of the tools which help the HR to identify expertise and find people with niche

skill sets based on their contribution and participation in a socially collaborative intranet environment.

“Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the potential to let an intranet become what the internet already is: an online platform with a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous and largely self-interested peers. On this platform, authoring creates content; links and tags knit it together; and search, extensions, tags and signals make emergent structures and patterns in the content visible, and help people stay on top of it all. Enterprise 2.0 technologies are subject to network effects; as more people engage in authoring, linking and tagging, emergent structure becomes increasingly fine-grained.”- Andrew P. McAfee in Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2009)

Dynamic Work Place

The corporate intranet is evolving continually and is viewed from a perspective of the consolidated

work place – the business oriented work tool.

Access and work from any place – the era of Mobile Communication is well and truly here. With

Mobile devices like the iPad, Blackberry and the iPhone, users have been accorded greater flexibility

in accessing their information irrespective of their locations.

Corporate Intranets as consolidated workplaces provide employees and business users with

information in context of their everyday work – helping them execute work faster and reduce the

overheads and efforts involved due to redundant information and data gathering activities.

Intranets as Dynamic workplaces provide organizations with a flexible platform that will allow them

to channel the overall goals and objectives to the entire organization and track to the set goals and

objectives in the right manner – helping them keep ahead of the competition.

Intranets as a Self Service Platform

Intranets will focus on delivering tools and applications that are self service in nature – allowing

employees to get access to all information and execute everyday tasks without the need to wait on

anything else

The self service tools of the intranets will be available at various levels – at the enterprise level,

departmental level, project / team level and peer to peer level, greatly improving the productivity of

the employees across the various functions of the organization as a whole.

Deliver HR, Finance and Facilities related services such as taxation information, benefit forms, expense

reporting etc for users to access content from a central repository in a secure manner.

Personal management tools helps streamline process online, reduce employee overheads and align

towards a more paperless organization.

The Collaboration Network Collaboration Intranets in 2011 will focus beyond team, project and departmental level

collaboration and facilitate intra departmental / business function collaboration making it

easy to streamline majority of the critical collaboration processes within organization.

Social tools bring in the concept of social collaboration – which simplifies the contribution,

sharing and dissemination of content, information and documents, making it possible to

review and approve in a faster manner.

Collaboration intranet will help to identify and address specific needs and initiatives

around projects, departments and collaboration teams.

Establish the best practices of communities across the organization where employees can

utilize a single interface to communicate, collaborate, foster ideas and share knowledge.

Enterprise Search Social and community tools enable employees with self service content contribution

capabilities, increasing the volume of content on the intranet, making search an important

part of the enterprise intranet

Intranets are focused on providing context based search that allows users to look beyond

just documents and content, but also obtain information based on people search,

expertise and social tagging.

Enterprise Content Management

Intranets 2011 will give prominence to user generated content and will include tools that bring in the

concepts of Web 2.0 to allow users to quickly contribute and share content.

Content organization and structuring will move beyond folders hierarchies and will be managed with a

combination of enterprise taxonomy for formal structuring and folksonomies using free flow, user

specific tags for organizing the content and information based on the user’s preferences.

Personalization will be one of the key feature that needs to be integrated within the Intranets 2011.

With personalization, employees and business users can have a “dedicated” personal space on the

intranet where they can collect, track and manage information and data relevant to them from across

the intranet.

Intranets 2011 will see enterprise content being consistently delivered through various types of

interfaces like smart phones and other mobile business devices.

The Digital Environment

Organizations will look beyond documents and presentations and utilize rich media like videos, flash

embeds and audio files among others which are interactive and are delivered through interfaces that

stream these files or social and community mechanisms like wikis and blogs among others.

Help employees access real time information and enhance business intelligence outputs through a single dashboard. Reduce turn around times in key decision making requirements.



The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

Security

Document Management

Content Management

GovernanceWorkflows

Business Solutions

Self Service

Collaboration

Knowledge Management

Formal Infrastructure

Internationalization

Mobile Intranets

Digital Dashboards

Business Applications

Real Time Data

Workforce Enhancements

Blogs & Wikis

Commenting

Micro blogging

Rating

People & Content Search

Social Tools

Industry & News Feeds

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise

Departments

Teams

Individuals

Integrate to the Informal Structure

Integrate to the daily work requirements

Intranets 2011 = The Consolidated Work Place

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The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA


User Profiling

Tasks

Customization

Social Networking

Mobile Intranets

Real Time Data

Digital DashboardsGlobally Local

Business Tools

Governance

Taxonomy & Translations

Language Management

User Profiling

Tasks

Customization

Social Networking

Employee Enhancement

User Profiling - Help users create their profile with customized data to display

areas of interest, awards and achievements, expertise etc. Profiles to

become the basis of talent, resource and knowledge management.

Task Oriented - Provide a single interface for employees to carry out

their daily tasks and business functions with simplified digital

interactions to increase employee efficiency.

User Experience - Provide high quality and rich user experience so that employees

have better interfaces, lesser page loading and refreshing times and application that execute faster

Customizations - users can personalize and customize their profiles to suit their needs and

requirements. Easier to develop networks and connections as other employees are able to identify social

information more easily and accurately.

Social Networking - Establish the platform for integrated knowledge sharing environment with

enterprise 2.0 features. Foster ideas and thoughts with expert opinions, ratings, wikis, blogs, forums,

RSS feeds amongst others to improve employee productivity.

Technology

Mobile Intranets - The consolidated work place environment has given rise to the importance of

providing instant access to employees who are on the move and require access to documents, information

and even upload real time data for other employees to access. With devices like

iPad, Blackberry and iPhone amongst other devices accessing

information has never been easier.

Applications Enablement- Providing better user experience has

been simplified with tools like VoIP, video streaming, audio

enhancements, RIA and Ajax etc which has become

a norm more than a wish list.

Digital Dashboards - with integration capabilities to various legacy

systems and LOB’s like CRM, reporting systems, databases etc.

employees can access everything through a single interface

and at real time if need be.

Mobile Intranets

Real Time Data

Digital Dashboards

Globally Local

Business Tools

Governance

Business Tools - To view the Intranet from a perspective that will allow the

organization to fulfill their purpose, objectives, achieve goals and keep tab

on the KPI’s. An ability to connect and understand employee better with

focus on skills, idea fostering and talent management .

Intranet Governance - More focused governance polices procedures – an

inherent shift from just control to more flexibility in publishing and rating with

a decentralized structure from previous models.

Uniform Community Culture - Align employees to the company culture

and objectives with greater emphasis on understanding and sustained

development

Business Objectives

Globally Local - Multi – location organizations are keen on localizing their content while maintaining a

global approach. Organizations are keen on providing information that is more locally relevant to a

particular location – such a weather updates, news update, traffic etc

Content Management

Taxonomy - Ability for organizations to maintain taxonomy based on

user generated content, especially vital for those organizations that

have international work force.

Internationalization - Improve content relevance based on the language

of choice – ability to view blocks based on the language in use.

Translation Management - To over see the translation requirements of

the different end users; simplified icons to help users identify the

language of their choice, keep track of the content, translation requests

and job queues.

Search – Provide a framework that allows users to obtain relevant

content with tagging, keywords and content types that simplifies

search capabilities.


Taxonomy & Translations

Language Management



The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

Social

Top 5 Features of

Intranet



The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

Collaboration

Team Sites

Project Portals

Community Sites

Discussion Portals

Knowledge Wikis

Information Management

Workflows and Approvals

Content Publishing

Document Lifecycle Management

Records Retrievals and Archiving

Digital Assets Management

Back End Systems Integration

Line of Business Data

Employee Enhancement

Forms and Requests

FAQs

Videos, Tutorials and Self Helps

Knowledge Management Portals

Support

Idea Management

Manager Tools

Facility Maps

Enterprise Network

My Sites

Department Portals

Activity Portals

Social Networking



The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

SharePoint 2010 features the latest Enterprise 2.0 capabilities can provide a high value intranet with

rich user experience, better share point intranet design and effective governance policies. The top features that drive

intranets on SharePoint 2010 platform are –

Social Capabilities – SharePoint 2010 provides a host of social tools that are designed to help employees

connect, discover, share and grow. Ex: My sites allows users to create profiles that help to connect with the

organization.

Search – Enterprise search has been vastly improved with features like FAST Search, Faceted Search and

thumbnails with increased scalability to millions of documents, different data sources and ability to infer

metadata from content.

Document Management – SharePoint 2010 provides advanced document management capacity with features

like document sets, templates, records managements etc.

Metadata – Taxonomy has been enhanced in SharePoint 2010 to meet classification and hierarchy needs of

content with option to cater for user generated content.

Workflows – Meet complex business workflow requirements in SharePoint 2010. Additionally utilize features

like Visio services to create workflow and display their current status.

Others – SharePoint 2010 also provides host of other prominent features like working offline, mobile

support, themes, web standards, ribbon for easy add and edit etc.

Feature Description

Tagging & Rating SharePoint 2010 provides inbuilt web parts and features for allowing users to tag and rate content

RSS Improvements include enhancements of RSS output from SharePoint – from an content, format and security standpoint

Mobile Support Includes native clients for iPhone and Blackberry

MicroBlogging Lightweight conversation with community integration, comments, liking email notifications and summaries

Activity Streams Aggregation of events from across all the SharePoint sites including community actions, microblogging, commenting, third party status updates from facebook, twitter etc.,

People, Profile & Expertise Management

Integrated tightly with Social Networking

Connectivity Users will be able to connect and work with peers – online or offline

Rich Media Integration Out of the box rich media support (beyond just having document libraries)

Metadata Management Automatic extraction of metadata from images, configuring a folder to automatically add tag content with a specific tag, support for folksonomies, and the addition of the Enterprise Managed Metadata service

Feature Description

Blogs & Wikis Improved with better features for content authoring, support for images and built-in workflows

Social Bookmarking Enables end users to bookmark and share favorite sites, pages, documents among others

People & Expertise Search Capture knowledge not found in documents using People & Expertise

Common Connector Framework for indexing & Federation

Securely connect out of the box to content from sources across the enterprise

Scale & Performance via improved topology architecture

Meet the scalability & performance needs of Enterprise and departments

Build Search Powered Applications Leverage publicly available query object model & web parts for extensibility

Refinement panel & Sorting Narrow down the search and navigate to the right content faster

Search in Context Field different results and refinement options based on the user profile

Social Behavior improves relevance Includes document ranking based on click through behavior



The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

Intranets 2011

Best Practices

Information Architecture

User Experience

GovernanceMobile

Intranets

Social Networking

Internationa-lization

Information Architecture

The Information Architecture plays a big role in the user acceptance of the intranet –design the

architecture to provide a consistent user experience.

Establish the common categories and sections that users tend to use – HR, Company

Information and News have been the most popular traditionally

Simplify the process of personalization and customizations - Quick links are an example of how

users view the links they regularly visit

Factor in dynamic growth of user profiles and social tagging features to support search and

visibility. With user profiles playing a central role in content relations and management, the

architecture should be dynamic and self sustaining in nature

Consider future changes and scope of intranet growth from a social networking, content

management, collaboration and as well as governance policies .

Mobile Intranets

Mobile access of intranets are more focused on meeting high priority requirements – such

as documents management, collaboration needs etc

Provide features that take in to consideration of the device in use – small screens, input

devices, download delays and design and compatibility of mobile sites.

Provide only business critical functions on mobile usage – full usage of intranets on

mobile devices caused more hindrance then enhancement

Establish support features for mobile devices – maintenance of intranet should be

expanded to mobile usage in addition to full intranet usage.

Social Business Tools

Asses and identify the social networking maturity of the organization – not all social networking

features are required; strike the balance of requirement and access

provided to employees.

Social tagging and profiling are important artifacts that have enhanced social networking

features – provide for users to identify those attributes that will help in improving their social

visibility and network across the organization

Provide for social taxonomy and folksonomies that will allow for people with similar interests,

problems and identifying experts. “User rating” is of particular importance as it helps identify an

user with an issue or line of expertise that other employees stand to gain from and boosts

knowledge management.

Social Profiles should contribute towards HR functions and allow the HR department to

identify those resources and experts who can add value to a particular requirement or fulfill

requirements outside of their domain. Helps in enhancing talent management

and idea management

User Experience

User experience forms a core requirement for acceptance of the intranet – keep it simple and

easy to use for users to relate to it.

Consider Web 2.0, collaboration, social networking and internet styles while designing the user

experience.

Leverage latest technology like VoIP, video streaming, audio enhancements, RIA and Ajax,

providing better user experience to interact has become the norm

Utilize SharePoint intranet design practices to ensure that employees have better interfaces,

lesser page loading and refreshing times and application that execute faster – follow popular

social networking platforms that follow simplistic views and trends.

Implement search capabilities that allows employees to obtain relevant information

encompassing documents, content, profiles, experts etc in shorter time spans – “Accurate

results leads to greater productivity”.

“I want to Google my internal work spaces, rendered as the intranet. “ - In the words of an end user.

Intranet Governance

Intranet governance requires top level sponsorship across all key stake holders to plan,

approve, develop and deploy intranets – clear definition of objectives, goals and mission is a

critical need.

Ensure the tracking of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) across the business against the ROI,

user approval and acceptance and engagement matrices.

Establish clear guidelines on social networking, content management and publishing with

social media policies that define ownership and responsibility towards content

Build on existing policies and procedures instead of abolishing them – users will be able to

better relate to existing do’s and don’ts than having to understand from scratch

Evolve from the “blocking” scenario to more self governed scenario – put the onus on the

content owners and publishers to take responsibility of the data.

Simplicity and transparency are the keys to good governance.

Improved Employee Satisfaction

Employee surveys reveal that users are able to find relevant information faster. Ex: Users are able

to find experts in minutes when previously it took them hours or even days.

Enterprise 2.0 tools have improved knowledge sharing, idea fostering and resource management

enabling greater productivity and efficiency. Ex: New recruits are able to obtain support and

knowledge leading to faster learning curve.

Technology Enhancements

Mobile intranets provide access to employees from any location for collaboration and document

management leading to lesser turn around times. Ex: Sales employee can collaborate with any

team and get a quote instantly.

Communication has become faster with tools like IM, VOIP, Video Conferencing etc. This has also

reduced travel times and cost overheads.



The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

1. Assess Evaluate the organizational needs, people readiness and infrastructure – Establish the Intranet Maturity Framework

2. Plan Plan the user needs, profiling, tools, applications and governance that will best fit in to the social behavior at the organization

3. DesignDesign the site structure, Information Architecture and Technology Roadmap

4. CreateEstablish the platform and build the structure, integrate with the systems and roll out – The Consolidated Work Place

5. MonitorMeasure User acceptance, Provide Support and Optimize the Intranets

Assess

Plan

Create Design

Monitor



The Vision







Reference Roadmap

AGENDA

Monitor the User Acceptance and Support.

Obtain Feedback and Statistics to enhance the growth of the Intranet.

Create a Single Source for Users to carry

out the daily functions. Create a Single Source for Users to carry out the daily functions.

Integrate Mobile Components to provide access at All Times.

Provide Informal Tools and Applications as part of the formal infrastructure.

Enhance Knowledge Management and Foster Ideas amongst Employees with Tools like Blogs, Wikis, User Ratings, Social Tagging etc.

Implement Governance Tools, Policies and Procedures. Social Tagging etc.

Analyze the User Needs and Social Maturity of the End User

Key Stakeholders - Top Management, Business Unit Heads, Departmental Owners and End Users

Plan and Design the set of Social Tools to meet the User Attributes

Development of Governance and UAT

Consolidated Work Place

Work Enhancement

Integrating Formal with Informal

User Evaluation

Thank YouOptimus BT, 2550 Northwinds Parkway, Suite 140, Alpharetta GA 30009, USA Phone: (770) 569 1240 Fax: (770) 569 1242 Email: [email protected]: www.optimusbt.com

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