There’s an adage that is old for the intranet age (since they came to be mainstream in the early 90s) that says you shouldn’t put anything on the intranet that you wouldn’t put in print. It relates to the older adage that you shouldn’t print anything that you wouldn’t want anyone outside the company to read.

Your content is valuable. You wouldn’t want to share most of it with the outside world – especially the competition or media. However, if you are making content available via the intranet then it is possible it can be leaked externally. The number one leaking culprit, of course, is the employee.

There are three general positions or models to adopt vis a vis content protection:

• Open market – publish just about anything you can on the corporate intranet.
• Closed market – put sever constraints on what can be published.
• Asynchronous market – a hybrid model that entrusts employees with a certain level of responsibility to maintain confidentiality.

My own personal opinion is that if you’ve hired and trusted an individual to do a job that the organization deems crucial enough to justify the pay then most individuals are trustworthy and not likely to leak confidential information to outside sources. On the other hand, I wouldn’t publish any corporate top secrets either. As such I recommend most companies adopt an asynchronous model that assumes a certain level of responsibility and trustworthiness of employees but does not make widely available all information and data to all employees.

Regardless, intranet and corporate information managers do have a responsibility to inform employees of their responsibility and to limit the organization’s liability. Such action includes the development of several policies:

• Editorial policy
• Terms of use
• Acceptable use

Editorial policy

Your editorial policy is less of a legal security blanket and more of a definition of roles and responsibilities of those developing and maintaining online content. The editorial policy should include details on...

• content types
• style acceptability
• news determinants (e.g. currency, impact, etc.)
• formatting
• archiving
• photo treatments and bylines
• content management system rules and directions
• copyright and legal
• privacy and security
• governance including roles and responsibilities
• taxonomy (classification)
• site registration and indexing

Terms of use

Terms of use is a standard legal disclaimer. It says who owns it and declares the copyright, disclaims accuracy of content, etc.

Acceptable use

Acceptable use spells out the rules. Thall shall not...

• Email content outside of the company.
• Print and distribute content outside of the company.
• Release content to any media outlet.
• Rewrite or reproduce content for personal purposes or profit without the expressed written consent of the company (legal department).

Page footers

If you’re not already doing so make sure you have coded into your style sheets or CMS templates a footer that always includes the following:

• A legal disclaimer
• Terms of use
• Copyright stamp
• Name and email address of author
• Date of publish

While clients have hired me to develop these policies and standards the work is not really rocket science. It just takes a little time and thought that could save your organization some headaches in the future.

Can anyone set-up an intranet site in your company? However they want, whenever they want?

Yes, yes and yes is the standard answer at most companies. Believe it or not.

A couple of weeks ago I talked a little about IBM’s intranet and how they had nearly 10,000 intranets a couple of years ago. They now have about 5,000...

What is the cost of managing all those renegade sites in your organization?

Cost considerations aside, why should we reign in intranet sprawl? Well technical and security reasons are also top of mind.

Paul Chin recently wrote on IntranetJournal.com....

-  “Renegade applications (including intranet sites) raise many concerns for IT teams responsible for maintaining overall IT integrity because they:

-  Are not included in IT's official security model — internal and external security, user and group access control, and authentication method.

-  Are not included in IT's overall application integrity plan — system architecture, maintenance and backup procedures, and disaster recovery and business continuity.

-  May have been built with non-corporate standard development tools, language, and platform of which only the developer (and no one from the official IT development teams) is familiar with.

-  Are at risk of being abandoned should the developer leave the company.

Another good reason to halt intranet sprawl before it advances: your users. Having dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of intranet sites will confuse and irritate your users. Theirs one universal complaint: “I can’t find anything."

If you’re looking to do a redesign and don’t have budget to do an inventory of the sites on your intranet. Then go to your CFO and tell him how much this is costing the company and how much you can save the company if you reign in that intranet sprawl... you could be a hero!