What Makes A Good Intranet

WHAT MAKES A GOOD INTRANET?

__________________________AND CAN YOU BUILD IT IN MS

SHAREPOINT ?

Jed Cawthorne, Prescient Digital MediaJBoye09, Philadelphia, May 2009

Who is Prescient? An end to end Intranet consultancy Benchmarked best practices and a wide variety of

website case studies that is drawn upon for every client endeavor.

A well defined and proven methodology that formally aligns the Intranet with the organization’s business and objectives.

Prescient owns no software or hardware; we are technology neutral.

A focus on measured success, proven value and ROI

© 2009 Prescient Digital Media

3

Our Clients

http://www.amgen.com/index.html

http://www.sprint.com/

http://mail.emcmail.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/hA0GeSjr0A0Fy5l0AO

https://advisor.fidelity.com/static/axsh/common/nojavascript.shtml

Part 1 – What makes a good intranet

What makes a good intranet?

o It depends ! What do you want to do with it?

o How do you know what you want to do with it?o Ask key business stakeholderso Ask the users o Align the intranet to organisational strategy

o In other words, develop an intranet strategy in order to provide some direction


Where is the focus for your intranet?

Four major categories or elements of organisational need an intranet can address:

o Internal Communicationso Publishing content / informationo Collaborationo Activities – actually doing something


Communicationso The Communications unit is often the business

owner of the intranet

o Intranet possibly just one of many internal communications channels for broadcasting news and important internal messages

o There is a trend towards more conversational two-way communications

o There is also a trend towards multi-media delivery rather than just textual presentation


Publishingo The ability for all units and even individuals to

publish content for others within the organization to consume

o The single source of truth !

o Links to the wider information and knowledge management environment, including document management systems etc

o Web 2.0 trends, blogging, UGC, etc


Collaboration

o Web based intranet collaboration as replacement for or adjunct to other groupware and messaging systems

o Web based workspaces

o Web interfaces to email or Instant Messaging systems, document management systems etc

o For developing the 'work in progress' (before 'publishing' the final version)


Activities

o Going to the intranet to actually do something !

o Interactive online forms

o Applications like staff directories

o Access to all sorts of applications and systems that provide 'web' interfaces


The Intranet ecosystem !


but........

Whether you focus on all of these elements, or in your own context you only need your intranet to provide one or two of these, what makes it good ?


To build a good intranet.....Make sure you consider:o Design and Usability

o Information Organisation and Access, including: o Information Architectureo Findability & Search

o Content

o Tools and Applications

o Strategy, Planning and Resources


Design and usability

o User centric designo Persona developmento Use cases

o Graphic design and layout

o Accessibility

o Usability testing


Information Organisation & Accesso Structures !

o Information Architectureo Categorization of contento Navigation schemas

o Findability = Metadatao Metadata for navigation & search o Taxonomies, folksonomies and ontology'so Search facilities

o Security – access control and authentication


Contento Content is king !

o Tools and training for content authors / editors

o Processes and workflow

o Make it easy to create compelling content and provide 'stickiness'


Tools and applicationso To be a truly useful business tool the intranet

must facilitate activity

o A home for interactive tools and utilities, and navigation to and access point for other applications

o The intranet as the 'front end' for business processes, for example HR self service tools

o Keep it simple, but be innovative, add value !


A slight diversion - portalso A 'portal' is just a 'way in'

o Portals don't necessarily mean portal software

o An intranet can have more than one portal

o Different flavours of portal:o Collaboration centric o Business process centrico Application centric


Strategy, planning and resourceso Strategy is an absolute necessity, including

appropriate governance structures and policies

o Planning is also key – hence the 5P's:o Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance

o Resources are often not given enough consideration – do not forget the people!

o Don't forget to measure intranet performance


Part 2 – Sharepointy stuff......

Can you build a good intranet.......... using MS Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Yes – but don't be sucked in by MS marketing

MOSS is a bit 'jack of all trades, and master of non' so take that into account when planning



Sharepoint Technologies

Windows Sharepoint Services

WSS - Free download if you have a Windows Server licence

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007

The ‘cloud’ SaaS version of Sharepoint and other tools

Microsoft Online Services

MOSS07 – Separate server product, also requires MS SLQ Server to work

What does MOSS offer intranets ?


SharePoint for Intranets WSS – hosted for small business, on internal for

workgroup team sites

We will examine MOSS' facilities for: Providing Communications channels Publishing content & information Collaboration Facilitating business activities


Communications

Out of the box 'Publishing Portal' provides a news site template, with news archive and 'news article' content type

2 way communications channels (blogs, forums)

Out of the box multimedia capabilities are weak

No Digital Asset Management (DAM) features for managing audio and video content

2 way comms – not best of breed functionality


Publishing Content Replaced MS Content Management Server as the

Microsoft WCM product

WCM in MOSS ('Publishing' features) is not configured as 'on' by default, it must be turned on and configured for a particular installation

Out of the box Publishing Site templates are available to build upon including a 'Publishing Portal'

MOSS blurs the traditional lines between designer and developer

Accessibility is not good – requires 3rd party tool kit© 2009 Prescient Digital Media

Collaboration Divisional / business unit level collaboration portal is

often touted as MOSS sweet spot

Collaboration is firmly document centric

Everything can be published as RSS

Summary: a quote from Michael Sampson’s, “7 pillars of IT-enabled Team Productivity”:


“SharePoint’s collaboration features leave much to be desired. SharePoint can not be said to a mature collaboration product. If you want more than shared access to team data, SharePoint is not the tool for your organisation”

Facilitating Activities More complex activities include providing access to

other applications via WebParts etc

It can be used to publish InfoPath forms to users who don't have the InfoPath client

SharePoint Designer and / or Visual Studio needed for coding more complex workflows

MOSS is just a front end for Windows Workflow Foundation services

.Net development platform – you can build just about anything with it, but how much will that cost ?


Conclusions

SharePoint can be your intranetBut..............

o Don't let IT foist it on you because they have licences – business and user requirements have to be met !

o If you don't have MS skills or .Net expertise on site or the budget to hire it, then keep it simple

o As a general rule MOSS is good for an SMB intranet, or divisional intranet portal, but not enterprise level (1,000 seat plus) intranets.

Jed Cawthorne MBA MBCS CITPSenior Business ConsultantPrescient Digital Media

416.926.8800

www.PrescientDigital.comwww.intranetblog.comwww.ecm-stuff.blogspot.com

Twitter: @jedpc & @Intranet2


Technology

What Makes A Good Intranet