IBF24 ran a contest during the 24 hour marathon webinar on intranets called “My Beautiful Intranet.” The winner: The European Space Agency.

The runners-up: RSA, CapitalOne, NATS and AMP.

William Hudson, IBF's Director of User Experience judged the competition. Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who took part.

You can see all the screenshots here (members of www.ibf24.com only), if you are a member. Some great designs for sure. For the life of me I could not locate the screenshot of the European Space Agency on that confusing site, but it must be pretty darn special to have beaten out Capital One and Schwab which both look to have outstanding intranets.

If any of the winners want to share their screenshots to a wider audience then please send them along and I’ll post them with any quotes or background you’d like, I can also do likewise to the Intranet Global Forum Facebook community.

There was lots learned by the recent IBF24 marathon. A lot of talk on innovation and leading intranet applications, etc. I believe IBF is going to sell the CD or DVD of the presentations, and I would highly recommend the ones on the IBM intranet, the Nissan intranet, and the one on Nokia (it was under the Enterprise 2.0 segment, and had absolutely zero to do with Enterprise 2.0, but it is a strong intranet and I like how they’ve integrated text messaging (like Nissan) into their intranet portal home page.

One intranet manager, Kurt (I’ll not divulge his full name nor his organization for the sake of fulfilling his confidentially obligations to his organization) informed me that one of the most popular features on his company’s intranet (a financial services organization of more than 10,000 employees) is a ‘jumpword’ application. A jumpword tool is attached to the search engine and allows people to seek out the best results which are manually coded to a specific keyword search.

“One of the areas we have issues on is our navigation and providing more service to the employee on our intranet,” says Kurt.  “The jumpword application allows people to enter something like “performance” and it takes them to the performance management site, which is highly popular. It’s a good tool but has festered into over 2000 jumpwords which is a heavy indication that the navigation is not helping people get what they need.”

The jumpwords application is written in .NET with a backend SQL database. Employees fill out a request form (attached to the online application) requesting their jumpword and the URL they want it directed to. When a user types in the jumpword it does a lookup of the jumpword file and has logic that redirects them to the site associated URL. If there is no jumpword it brings them to the front search page.

This organization uses the FAST search engine – which is really quite good and highly rated so you get an idea of why manual jumpwords or ‘best bets’ should be a priority for any organization. The search engine can only do so much, and in the absence of a detailed taxonomy that requires mandatory and rigorous meta tagging, the search engine’s potential can be highly limited.  

Also supporting the intranet, owned by IT, with “a lot of the content governed by Employee Communications,” is the Interwoven TeamSite CMS platform, and a separate document sharing platform built on SharePoint (WSS, though migrating to MOSS 2007).  Kurt also tells me that content management is distributed or ‘decentralized’ with the respective owners responsible for updating their own content. The Employee Communications team provides guidelines on content structure but “due to not having a centralized owner and/or executive sponsor, teams opt many times to build their own sites using funding from their organizations – a major issue and has been for a while now.”

Yes, even really strong and innovative intranets have problems, and have much to improve, rework, and reinvent. It’s no surprise then that even the ‘most beautiful intranet’ is far from perfect and that the journey for most has only just begun.

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