Open source platforms continue to advance and evolve and they’re starting to appear more often as solutions for enterprise intranets.

According to WhatIs.com, “Open source refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. (Historically, the makers of proprietary software have generally not made source code available.) Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely available.”

One of the leader’s in the open source intranet space is Plone – a collaborative content management system that is regarded as one of the better open source enterprise intranet platforms. Plone features enterprise content management with workflow, role-based content, a search engine and even a wiki (see www.WikiPedia.com for an example of a collaborative wiki).

Non-techies can use Plone without knowing a stitch of HTML. The system includes templates for news, events, documents, and photos. An additional 200+ templates and tools are also available for download. The visual editor is Kupu which bears comparison to a light version of Microsoft Word.

Plone is actually based on Zope, a Python-based application server, and CMF, a content management applications platform. Plone sits on top of Zope via a user-friendly interface. In all, some 100 developers support and work on the platform.

External websites that are using Plone includes the websites for the Brazilian Parliament and UNC Healthcare.

How vulnerable is your intranet to an outside attack? What is the potential damage to the company if your intranet is hacked?

If you don’t know the answer to those two questions, which could be posed at any time from either your CIO, CFO or Chief Legal Counsel, you’d better get cracking on the answers.

“Security risk assessment and security risk management have become vital tasks for security officers and IT managers,” says Caleb Sima founder and CTO of SPI Dynamics, in his article Security Risk Assessment in Web Application Security. “Corporations face increased levels of risk almost daily: from software vulnerabilities hidden in their business-technology systems to hackers and cyber crooks trying to steal proprietary corporate intellectual property, including sensitive customer information.”

Actually, the potential risks and threats to your organization are likely much higher than you expect. Enough to keep the CIO, CFO and CEO up at night biting their nails wondering how to handle the potential PR disaster.

Of the 556 executive interviewed in a recent Fusepoint/Sun Microsystems/Leger Marketing survey, 55% say that their confidential and private data is at risk of an attack. 55% say their confidential data is at risk!! Good lord!! This despite the fact that most consumers (58%) would immediately terminate their relationship with a company that compromised their personal information.

A recent survey reveals that business leaders believe the greatest threat is not from a malicious external attack, but rather from the hands of an uninformed employee. The research showed that 46% percent of respondents said that employees who accidentally download security-compromising viruses, spyware or adware pose a greater data security risk to a company than external agents like hackers, cited next at 40%.

Caleb Sima offers the following equation for measuring and assessing your organization’s potential risk:

Risk = Value of the Asset x Severity of the Vulnerability x

Likelihood of an Attack

“In this equation, you can provide a weighting of 1-10 (10 being the most severe or highest) for each risk factor. By multiplying the factors, it’s easy to arrive at an aggregate security risk assessment for any asset. Let’s take an everyday example: we have an e-commerce server that performs 40 percent of all customer transactions for the organization, and it has a very severe and easy-to-exploit vulnerability: E-commerce Server Risk = 10 (Value of the Asset) x 10 (Severity of the Vulnerability) x 10 (Likelihood of an Attack).”

Fortunately, according to Sima’s calculation, the intranet is at a lower threat of outside attack:

Intranet Server Risk = 2 (Value of the Asset) x 8 (Severity of the Vulnerability) x 6 (Likelihood of an Attack). The Intranet Server Risk = 96, a lower security risk assessment ranking.

However, when understanding your risk or threat to the intranet, an outside attack is not your biggest threat. Your employees are your biggest threat.

“Although media and management attention is focused on protecting external-facing sites from security threats, identity theft and other online vulnerabilities, intranets should not be overlooked,” writes Peter McKay, CEO of Watchfire in a recent Federal Times article When securing information, don’t overlook intranet. These sites can easily be compromised, and government IT executives are now realizing the need to expand security and privacy practices to agency intranets.”

If you’re a communicator, HR or marketing person responsible for the intranet then you need to ask the right questions of your IT department. First and foremost is understanding what you have, what is available to a wider audience, and what is specifically being done to secure it.”

To better secure your intranet, McKay makes several recommendations:

·    Conduct an inventory of internal Web properties to better understand the Web environment. Knowing how many sites and servers you have, the technologies in use, and the technology policies and standards your agency employs will create a more secure and productive intranet environment.

·    Scan your intranet with an automated solution to identify vulnerable areas, including forms that may be inconsistent with internal privacy policies or may lead to information leaks.

·    Understand what employee and citizen information is being collected and published on the Internet and intranet. The intranet is used to publish sensitive information, including human resources forms and employee health care information. Full knowledge of all online data-collection methods is critical to effectively managing Web privacy.

·    Understand exactly who has access to this sensitive information. Proper technology and security controls will allow employees to see only the information required to do their jobs. Often, contractors are granted access without careful consideration for all the information they may have access to.

·    Consider applicable security, privacy and accessibility legislation such as the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act, the 2002 E-Government Act and the 1998 Rehabilitation Act amendments.

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Tis the season for prognosticating the future and issuing the annual prediction list for the coming year!

(Intranet job posting below)

Does anyone really care? Does anyone running an intranet actually have so little to do and so much time on their hands that they believe some keyboard jockey (myself included) can predict what they should be worrying about in the upcoming year?

Yeah, I kinda want to know too!

Shiv Singh writes about his top Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006 in CIO magazine. Singh knows his stuff and is clearly a solid intranet mind, but I honestly don’t agree with him on most accounts. I do however like two or three of his seven prognostications:

1. The Intranet grows up and makes new friends (DISAGREE) 

Singh claims that “As these intranets morph into Swiss army knife-like systems that solve more employee problems, the lines between enterprise applications, department specific tools and employee intranets will blur considerably.” Sadly, most corporate intranets are already far too Swiss army-like. A very small few do it well, but the majority (my guess is about 90%) are a complete mess and it will be painfully obvious to the user that there is not just a fuzzy line separating the intranet home page and a specific application but an ugly colored line with poor navigation and design.

2. Intranet ROI will be pushed to the back burner (DISAGREE)

Once again I have to shed a tear because Intranet ROI has ALWAYS been on the back burner – ROI has never been on the front burner. My ROI study (see ROI Remains Guesswork At Most Companies) of 240 organizations found that only 6% of organizations undertake ongoing, specific measurement of the ROI of their intranet. Occasional measurement is undertaken by only 26% of organizations and 51% either do no measurement, don’t know if they do, or only guess at the ROI. 18% are considering ROI measurements. I’ve worked with dozen of intranet firms and only two or three had done any ROI measurement before I met them. I absolutely guarantee you (I wager $1000 for someone who can prove me wrong) that anything has changed. As pathetic as it sounds, most executives don’t give a rat’s ass about the intranet. They have no clue and don’t care. It’s a cost center. For this reason alone, the need to develop a business case and ROI will become more pervasive and in demand. Though most of the time it will be forgotten, ROI will be measured in more than 6% of organizations in 2006.

3. Expect Intranets to become even more pervasive (DISAGREE)

Many of the statistics that I’ve seen show that more than 90% of large and medium size companies have intranets. Small companies that have launched intranets have skyrocketed in recent years. Intranets are already pervasive and their growth rate is slowing simply because critical mass has already been achieved (note the decline in fortunes of companies such as Intranet.com (recently bought out). Singh’s rationale though is correct  “Expect to see many more dynamic, innovative intranets in the near future, whether they’re servicing the board members of a Fortune 500 company or farmers in a developing country. Also, expect to be challenged to deliver more dynamic and innovative intranet solutions for your employees and business partners.” Definitely; the business wants to deliver more innovation and employees demand it.

4. The user experience matters at last (DISAGREE)

Singh is right: users are demanding a better user experience, “Time and again, employees repeatedly ask that their intranet user experience be as simple, efficient and satisfying as their Google experience.” This however has been happening for years. To satisfy this need most companies are redesigning their intranet every year to two years. So, most already believe the user experience matters, hence the redesigns. However, the execution is weak. It’s bloody awful. The crap I see... Perhaps more than anything Singh believes that it will continue to get better. I hope so.

5. The Ajax revolution hits the intranet (AGREED)

Ajax is hot and IT is catching the fever. “There has been a lot of buzz about Ajax in recent months. Ajax is a loose knit of programming technologies that speeds up the Web experience and brings greater interactivity to websites... Expect to see nifty, task oriented, highly interactive Ajax and flex based applications on your intranet fueling the next wave of user adoption.” I agree. I already have one client (a major credit card company) that has a very cool employee locator map that shows the floors and position of employee desks on each floor. Clicking on the desk pulls up employee contact information and can even direct you to the closest meeting room, and then allow you to book that meeting room – all in seconds!

6.     Blogs come and go but RSS will remain (DISAGREE – AGREE)

Blogs are huge and they are exploding on the intranet – and they’re here to stay (see Blogging the intranet and Study: Intranet blogging on the rise  and McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs). Some blogs will disappear, for certain. But for every one that disappears there will probably be 3 or 4 new blogs. I absolutely agree that RSS will not only remain but also explode. In fact, it’s because of RSS that blogs will continue to explode.

7.      Wikis gain prominence and get integrated (AGREE)

Definitely – bang on. “Many smaller, less structured companies have embraced wikis as their intranet technology platform. For these organizations with flatter, less formal hierarchies, the self correcting mechanisms of a wiki create the right balance of empowering the employees to share and preventing things from spinning out of control.” (See Wiki The Intranet and Investment banker uses wiki for employee collaboration)

--

JOB POSTING:

IT Analyst at Suncor Energy Inc (https://www.linkedin.com/e/G3u7dinv_6UcuabuGfVpNCuq_IIYgagk369Uvzl/vjb/33658/bjob/)

(Send your intranet job ops to me as comments or via our website at www.PrescientDigital.com)

Building and maintaining a site map or site index is, like on-site Search, fixing the symptom and not addressing the true problem,” writes renowned usability guru Jared Spool in his most recent posting, What about Site Maps and Site Indexes? (thanks to James Robertson).

Mr. Spool is a smart guy. A web leader. A true guru. But he’s dead wrong on this issue. Well, partly wrong.

Jared maintains that if the site navigation or ‘scent’ is good, you don’t need a site map. Wrong. Even regular users go the site map once in a while. Yes, navigating the sites navigation tree or categories is preferred, followed by using the search engine, but sometimes users just want a site map to have a bird’s eye view of the entire site... to see how content relates to each other, particularly first time users.

Spool also intimates in his above comment that search is redundant if your navigation is good. Tell that to IBM, Cisco, Oracle or anyone else who has millions of pages on their intranet. I dare anyone reading this to ditch their search engine and then sit back and see what the employee or customer user says....

“Fix the scent problems and the need for on-site Search diminishes quickly,” says Spool. This is correct. If your navigation is good, then search and site maps become tertiary considerations. But again, you may still have up to 5 or 10% of your first-time users heading to the site map regardless of the quality of your site scent. What is intuitive to one person, is not necessarily intuitive to another. I mean, I voted for George Bush, doesn’t everyone?!?! Just kidding, I’m Canadian and therefore can’t vote for George Bush. *Shudder*

“Investing resources in building an effective site map or site index is taking resources away from fixing scent problems,” says Spool. Dude, man, you couldn’t be more wrong. How many site owners are still custom coding a site map?!?! Very few. Any platform or content management system worth its salt automatically creates and updates your site map. If it’s automatic, then why ditch it?

Spool is write however to intimate that you should never, never rely on a site map as a primary navigation mechanism. First, maximize your navigation. Secondly, maximize the search engine effectiveness and its supporting meta tagging strategy and taxonomy. But don’t do the first two at the expense of a site map. Site maps are still appreciated by some, and expected by many.

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Linking web visits with offline sales

At one time, in the late 90s, IBM had 10,000+ intranet sites. No, not pages, 10-THOUSAND intranet sites (representing millions of pages). I call that gross intranet sprawl.

What’s a megalithic corporation to do with 10 grand rebel sites? Shut ‘em down.

Of course, they weren’t so crass to start hacking and slashing every site. Though by establishing a centralized platform, a set of enforceable policies, and a measure of political campaigning and time, IBM eventually rationalized more than 6,000 intranet sites. The campaign saved IBM $9-billion (BILLION!).

Most intranet owners cooperated willingly. And why wouldn’t they? If the corporation provides a central platform, an easy-to-use publishing tool, indexing from the central search engine and technical hosting, why wouldn’t renegade site owners jump at the opportunity to close their intranet site? They would; they did. Some of course were reluctant and a less subtle form of persuasion was needed in the end.

“Driving the consolidation of sites was difficult,” said IBM’s Liam Cleaver, a key manager of IBM’s intranet portal W3, in our recent webminar, Intranet World Tour with IBM. “We owned little and controlled less. “But we (the portal team) do own the URL w3.ibm.com and groups want to have that root in their URL. To be part of that they have to adhere to standards and we have the authority to shoot down sites. We don’t like to play cop but prefer carrot and stick approach that sells the value.”

Close the rebel site, migrate the content, relinquish the hassle, pocket the money.

Well, easier said then done. Believe me, by jove, it isn’t easy. It takes an open pit mine full of gumption, political fortitude and a double reinforced iron gut. If you’ve got brass kahunas to try it, the rewards can be high.

Here are the ingredients needed to attempt a site rationalization program:

• A forceful and tactful executive champion that is, with few exceptions, a C-level chief.

• A united and strong central steering committee or council that widely represents core business services and business units.

• A strong business case with anticipated and measured return on investment (dollars and cents sell business cases).

• A robust central intranet portal and supporting technology.

• An engaged and participatory IT department (no more excuses about understaffing and bigger priorities).

• A set of enforceable intranet standards and polices (development policy, editorial policy, etc.) that spell out the rules, roles and responsibilities of all.

• A central content management system and publishing tool that stores and indexes all content with standardized page and document templates.
• A decentralized content publishing model where content authors and owners write, publish and manage their own content via the central CMS while adhering to the aforementioned polices and standardized templates.

Start small and seek out friends for some easy wins. Rationalize a few sites. Talk about the program benefits and success for the content owners and the publishers. Sell, sell, sell. Once the carrot looses its shine and ceases being effective, then pull out the big stick.

Whatever you call it, rationalization, cooperation or adoption, the path to success will be fraught with politics. Intranets are political footballs and politics will almost always be an intranet manager’s top challenge, in most organizations. This is a natural outcome of the many divergent groups with different minds and ways of looking at the world forced to work together in a cooperative environment and a common platform. Communications sees the world far differently than IT. Marketing approaches business far differently than HR. So friction is natural. Hence the need for a strong champion, a cohesive steering committee, and an armful of polices (legislation) to support the process.

“I've had the opportunity to work closely with both developers and end-users during these system adoptions and have always noticed a subtle but very real threat to the outcome,” writes intranet journalist Paul Chin in his latest column, Lil' Orphan Intranet: Adopting an Ownerless System. “It isn't a technical threat, it's a social threat. IT may feel some animosity, justified or not, toward renegade developers...  Users, however, should never have to bear the brunt of this frustration.”

There’s the rub. The intranet must serve the audience: the users, your employees. Measured ROI and cash saved is important. Without the support and use by employees, however, that ROI will never be realized. The buck stops with the users who are tired of the frustrating experience that the intranet has become. A rationalization program will save money, but it will also save the sanity of frustrated users who are tired of complaining, “I can never find anything!”

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A new UK survey finds that IT staff turnover is increasing, and so is the demand for both intranet and Internet development which are amongst the highest IT skills in demand. Also in high demand are business analyst skills... no doubt needed for project planning and aligning IT with business goals (something that is sorely needed in too many organizations; though consultants like myself can’t complain).

IT staff turnover, recruitment and retention problems and skills shortages have all increased over the past year according to respondents to this year's National Computing Centre Benchmark of Salaries and Employment Trends in 2006. The independent annual survey reveals:

Greater staff turnover

The rate of staff turnover over the past 12 months (staff leaving as a percentage of staff in post) was 12.0%, a significant increase from the 9.4% reported in last year's Benchmark. Systems and support staff joining respondents' organizations also increased from 12.0% to 13.1% of staff in post.

Shortages

• Perceived shortages for all systems and support staff were slightly up on last year at 5.2%, but over 25% of the respondents identified specific recruitment or retention skills over the last year (up 5% on last year).

Projected demand in decline

• 41% of respondents expect their IT staff numbers to grow over the next two years, with 41% expecting numbers to remain the same. Last year more than 50% predicted increase in IT staff numbers. The most rapid growth is forecast by small IT departments and by those in the IT Services sector.

New skills in demand
26% of respondents identified specific IT skills for which they had encountered recruitment or retention difficulties (up from 20% last year), whilst a further 26% of respondents identified a requirement for new skills over the next 12 months. Prominent amongst the new skills were .NET and Java development skills, Windows 2003 Server, VoIP, and business analysis skills.

Significant numbers of respondents are seeking business analysis skills over the next twelve months and these tend to be recruited rather than trained in house.

Managing Director of NCC Membership Services, Stefan Foster said, "Last year's Benchmark reported an upturn in most IT labor market variables and in the short term it would appear that this situation is continuing. The only indicator that has fallen since last year is respondents' expectations of future IT staff requirements."

Stefan continued, "It looks like the dust will begin to settle on the labor market by next summer, but watch out, with certain skills such as internet and intranet development, demand will be high, so put your recruitment plans together now - or risk a fight for skilled staff later in the year".

"With many organizations implementing Voice over Internet Protocol technologies (see NCC's Benchmark of IT Strategy 2005) it is no surprise that skills in this area are highly prized."

The Benchmark of Salaries and Employment Trends in IT is based on an annual survey of the IT labor market, carried out by the National Computing Centre. The Benchmark published in December 2005 covers: salary increases, fringe benefits, bonus payments, staff joining and leaving, shortages and predicted growth in demand, new skills requirements and recruitment and retention problems. The analysis is based on an aggregation of the responses from 383 organizations, which provided salary and employment details for 9,346 staff. The main analysis variables used in the report are: industry sector, geographical area and department size.

The Benchmark report can be purchased at the NCC online store (£330).

Analysis

For those hiring people, it means the cost of hiring has just gone up. It’s becoming a sellers market once again for skilled IT and business analysts. If you’re looking for a job, then the future looks bright.

If you have an intranet job that needs filling send it to me I will post (no charge) jobs daily (about 1,000 intranet minds a day are reading this site and readership is growing fast).

There are some really solid intranets out there by leading companies who are doing a great job. Sodexho USA is definitely a leader worth looking at. An in-depth look at the Sodexho intranet is precisely what I will extend to attendees to the next stop on the Intranet World Tour Webinar brought to you by Communitelligence.com.

Here’s a sneak peak at the SodexhoNET portal we’ll be examining and detailing on January 11:

SodexhoNet was recently redesigned from the initial case study which I originally documented in Best practices case study: Sodexho USA.

Learn how Sodexho undertook their successful re-design and how they manage and measure for success. Join the in-depth tour of a winning intranet then join myself and Sodexho USA for this jam-packed Webinar tour...

Intranet World Tour: SodexhoNet USA

January 11, 2006

3 - 4:15 p.m. (US Eastern)2 - 3:15 p.m. (US Central)1 - 2:15 p.m. (US Mountain)12 - 1:15 p.m. (US Pacific)

For more information or to reserve your space visit Communitelligence.com.

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Podcasting has started to crossover to the intranet. Once again, IBM is showing its corporate leadership and innovation by using podcasts for employees using podcasts to further build its internal communications arsenal. As Stacy Cowley of IDG News Service has discovered (IBM employees play with podcasting – thanks to Fredrik Wacka @ CorporateBlogging.com) the technology giant of 325,000 employees is using podcasting to lower their phone bills.

“In August, IBM made its first official foray into podcasting by launching a series of programs called "IBM and the Future of...," featuring its scientists and other staffers discussing topics like driving, shopping, banking and urban planning. Postcasts are audio files designed to be played on PCs or portable music devices like iPods; listeners can use software to subscribe for automatic downloads of new podcasts in series that interest them.

IBM, based in Armonk, New York, had occasionally posted internal podcasts before on its intranet, but its new "Future" series prompted the company to extend its podcasting support. IBM drafted a podcasting policy similar to the corporate blogging policy it adopted last year, and quietly released a tool for uploading audio files and syndicating them via RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Then it sat back to see what IBM staffers would create.

"People have just gone ahead and experimented," said Ben Edwards, IBM's manager of investor communications and the organizer of its "Future" series. "There are some very interesting models emerging."

One of Edwards' favorite creations is a weekly status update from IBM's supply chain organization. The group previously scheduled a weekly conference call with all the employees it needed to coordinate with -- a conference that involved as many as 7,000 people. Now, supply-chain executives upload a weekly podcast, which staffers can listen to when they want. "It's dramatically cheaper," Edwards said. "Plus you don't have thousands of people organizing their schedules around this weekly call."

I am continually amazed by IBM’s progressive leadership in the area of employee communications and technology. No need to tell me that it is easy for IBM being such a big company, with heaps of technology and endless coffers – that is not the reason. Podcasts, blogs, wikis, these are all low cost, easy to use tools. Any company can do it and yet few actually do. It does not matter that all employees are using podcasts or blogs nor does it matter that even a majority of staff pay any attention to these tools. They are being used by some and are delivering value.

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TORONTO, ON - I love the wiki concept. Wikis hold a lot of power and promise. A wiki however cannot substitute for an entire intranet.

My colleague Shel Holtz takes issue, and with good reason, with SocialText CEO Ross Mayfield (makers of the leading wiki software) who has suggested that all intranets could become wikis (see The future of intranets). Mayfield makes his comments on the Blogspotting show of Stephen Baker, a BusinessWeek reporter and blogger (seeRossMayfield interview).

Look lets not confuse a social communications tool with a business ecosystem. I’m sure I need not redefine what an intranet. A wiki can be used for many things including creating policies, dialogues, knowledge networks, etc. But a wiki is a tool, and only a tool. For professional communicators and business managers, it is but only one tool that should be considered in a larger mix of options.

“Whatever shape they take, intranets are, at their core, the Internet captured behind the firewall,” writes Holtz. “That definition embraced the suite of TCP/IP protocols... also allows the intranet to perform all manner of functions, from communication to collaboration, from streamlined online work processes to the archiving of static information in a hierarchical, navigable format. No single platform can contain all of the purposes a class-A intranet can fulfill.”

Bang on. What else does an intranet or portal offer that a wiki can never?

• Employee directory
• Self-service applications such as HR tools
• Personalized portals
• Dynamically generated content
• Advanced security, controls and workflow

No, I love wikis, but this social communictions phenom will never substitue a complete intranet or portal. Nor should it.

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CHICAGO, ILL - Wikipedia.com is a perfect illustration of the power of a well executed wiki. Anyone with a browser can write an article or edit any article of anyone else. With 825,000 articles and tens of thousands of volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is now the largest wiki on the Internet and it’s extraordinarily easy to use – more simple than MS-Word.

A wiki can also deliver powerful value inside on the intranet. At my company, Prescient Digital Media, we’ve set up wikis for discussing and finalizing our company values and our investing in people strategy.

Ziff Davis, one of the largest publishers of technology magazines in the World, uses a wiki to speed-up software development producing huge savings. 1UP.com, the gaming division of Ziff Davis, uses a wiki product made by Socialtext. According to the customer testimonial on the Socialtext website, the development wiki has created a far more efficient environment for working together which has greatly reduced the reliance on e-mail, as well as the associated lag time. 1UP.com measures the savings to date as a result of the wiki at than $1 million dollars.

So how do you go about setting up a wiki of your own? Here are eight easy steps:

1-     Determine your subject matter (e.g. intranets)

2-     Define your target audience (e.g. intranet managers and consultants)

3-     Establish objectives and measurable goals (e.g. 1,000 viewers per day)

4-     Determine the required feature set and functionality of your wiki (page history, RSS, etc.)

5-     Select the most appropriate technology (e.g. SocialText, Confluence, etc.)