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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I’ve had the pleasure to work on or help create dozens of intranets in the past few years, and seen and learned about many dozens of others. I can say with some confidence that IBM has the best intranet in the world. Some like Cisco and Microsoft come close, but not close enough (although the latter two are still fairly secretive about all the workings of their respective intranets, and IBM is quick to show it all).

Two years ago, Intranet Insider World Tour made a stop at IBM's w3. That was before Web 2.0 tools started changing the way organizations communicate and collaborate. Now see the new Web 2.0 IBM intranet with 30,000 bloggers, podcasts (audio & video), wikis, and Beehive, an internal version of Facebook. This highly informative webinar with a look at the IBM intranet and its tools is hosted by myself and Liam Cleaver, Program Director, Collaborative Innovation at IBM.

IBM's employee social networking site (alla Facebook), Beehive

This insider’s look at the IBM intranet is this Thursday, June 12 (see Intranet Insider World Tour Webinar: IBM's w3 - Transforming The Total Workplace Experience or register or purchase the CD here). This is a must attend for any intranet manager or consultant.

"We see the future workplace as ubiquitous; totally integrated; and senses work activity and responds with resources," says Cleaver. The goal of the IBM intranet is to increase productivity, collaboration and innovation of its 380,000 employees worldwide, 45% of whom work remotely in all global time zones.

Here is a sneak preview:

• Blue Pages: One universal employee directory, 50+ applications access & use the directory data, More than 1.5 million hits per day, 65% of employees use BluePages once a day.
• Beehive: Opt-in social networking site from IBM Research, Create a personal page to share interests, thoughts, photos and/or what you do in IBM, over 33,000+ registered members and 41,000+ photos uploaded
• Fringe: Experimental directory and networking site from IBM Research, Find colleagues based on skills, interests or other shared connections,
  see what's going on with the news in your social network through aggregated feeds
• BlogCentral: Opens up collaboration and creates connections across IBM through use of Web 2.0 technologies, 50,000+ users, 1,600+ active blogs
• WikiCentral: Provides easy and effective ways of collaboration in any size group. In April 2008, 3M+ page views, 1.3M+ total visitors
• Jams and ThinkPlace: Open, collaborative and on-going global forum, surfaces solutions to specific challenges, 16,000 ideas submitted since launch, 350+ ideas adopted, facilitates exchange of smaller ideas
• TAP @ work: SmallBlue: within intranet search retrieves experts based on tags and employee profiles recommending best path to connect, gives analysis of social network visually depicts people networks and geographic clusters.

"Google is often portrayed as the technology hipster, rolling out Web applications almost at whim.  But unseen to the public, IBM is rolling out Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, mashups and virtual reality technologies to help its employees be more productive.  Inside its firewall, Big Blue looks pretty hip."  Clint Boulton, eWeek.

Register now for the Intranet Insider World Tour Webinar: IBM's w3 - Transforming The Total Workplace Experience

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