What Makes A Good Intranet

WHAT MAKES A GOOD INTRANET? __________________________ AND CAN YOU BUILD IT IN MS SHAREPOINT ? Jed Cawthorne, Prescient Digital Media JBoye09, 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

Our Clients

Part 1 – What makes a good intranet

What makes a good intranet?

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

How do you know what you want to do with it?

Ask key business stakeholders

Ask the users

Align the intranet to organisational strategy

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:

Internal Communications

Publishing content / information

Collaboration

Activities – actually doing something

Communications

The Communications unit is often the business owner of the intranet

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

There is a trend towards more conversational two-way communications

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

Publishing

The ability for all units and even individuals to publish content for others within the organization to consume

The single source of truth !

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

Web 2.0 trends, blogging, UGC, etc

Collaboration

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

Web based workspaces

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

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

Activities

Going to the intranet to actually do something !

Interactive online forms

Applications like staff directories

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

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:

Design and Usability

Information Organisation and Access, including:

Information Architecture

Findability & Search

Content

Tools and Applications

Strategy, Planning and Resources

Design and usability

User centric design

Persona development

Use cases

Graphic design and layout

Accessibility

Usability testing

Information Organisation & Access

Structures !

Information Architecture

Categorization of content

Navigation schemas

Findability = Metadata

Metadata for navigation & search

Taxonomies, folksonomies and ontology's

Search facilities

Security – access control and authentication

Content

Content is king !

Tools and training for content authors / editors

Processes and workflow

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

Tools and applications

To be a truly useful business tool the intranet must facilitate activity

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

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

Keep it simple, but be innovative, add value !

A slight diversion - portals

A 'portal' is just a 'way in'

Portals don't necessarily mean portal software

An intranet can have more than one portal

Different flavours of portal:

Collaboration centric

Business process centric

Application centric

Strategy, planning and resources

Strategy is an absolute necessity, including appropriate governance structures and policies

Planning is also key – hence the 5P's:

P rior P lanning P revents P oor P erformance

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

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

© 2009 Prescient Digital Media 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

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 3 rd party tool kit

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”:

© 2009 Prescient Digital Media “ 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 intranet

But..............

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

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

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 CITP Senior Business Consultant Prescient Digital Media 416.926.8800 www.PrescientDigital.com www.intranetblog.com www.ecm-stuff.blogspot.com Twitter: @jedpc & @Intranet2 © 2009 Prescient Digital Media