Social media on the intranet (Intranet 2.0) is not a fad, or a passing trend that will fade away. Despite the curmudgeonly calls of the greying Luddites it’s not just here to stay, it’s breaking through the firewall with increasing velocity. Consider the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study: 87% of organizations have at [...]

“Intranet managers are forming large communities using external social media, getting support from peers around the world and gaining visibility for their roles and work,” says Jane McConnell in her annual Global Intranet Trends (2010) report. In fact, this growing community, spurred by social media, is one of the most prominent findings outlined in the [...]

“Toby, I just wanted to phone you and thank you for your article on Employees demand a clean home page, no scrolling,” says John, an intranet manager with a very large, prominent government organization. “It’s what I’ve been saying all along… but they (some executive types) won’t listen!” The problem with designers, not all designers, [...]

A few footnotes and suggestions for supporting intranet social media (intranet 2.0): Folksonomy – a folksonomy is surprisingly simple to implement (or begin); it’s far less advanced that you’d believe, and requires far less set-up than a taxonomy. But most organizations could benefit from both. For a folksonomy, all you need to do is give [...]

As I wrote in my May column of Intranets: Enterprise Strategies & Solutions (well worth the subscription: see IntranetsToday.com), great intranet parts can be bought some of the time, but truly great intranets cannot be bought entirely with money alone. Truly innovative intranets have some or all of four general qualities: TRANSACTIONS – transactive features [...]

In convening focus groups for a government health portal we (Prescient Digital Media) we built (and would eventually win a Webby Award for) I discovered a few universal truths about websites, one of which we all have to keep learning again and again: people hate advertising. The focus groups with different consumer segments and demographics [...]

1-     SharePoint will continue to dominate   All hail the king, SharePoint. SharePoint has become the single biggest, most pervasive intranet platform of all time (present in 50 – 60% of all medium to large-size organizations). While SharePoint is still minimally used for department and team level document sharing and collaboration, more organizations are looking [...]

Employees shouldn’t waste too much time on the intranet; social media wastes time; the Internet is a productivity drain. These are common refrains and concerns expressed by many executives, albeit the less educated ones, generally of an older generation, nearing or past retirement.   The exact same concerns were made about employee bathroom breaks, mealtimes, [...]

The Global Intranet Trends for 2010 report, the annual report from Jane McConnell, NetStrategy/JMC, has been released and is fittingly subtitled ‘Towards the workplace web’.   “Towards the workplace web reflects what is happening today in intranets around the world as organizations are positioning the intranet as the entry point into the organization’s ensemble of [...]

(SAN JOSE, CA) While an innovative intranet may be cool, and look great, a truly innovative intranet delivers true value and advances an organization's standing in its industry. The Intranet Innovations 2009 report celebrates the winners of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards, produced by Step Two Designs, sharing remarkable ideas from across the globe. Intranet [...]