The Navy-Marine Corp. Intranet (NMCI) – the world’s largest intranet currently submitting to an $8 billion dollar facelift – is the subject of the latest lobbying scandal to hit Washington, D.C.

According to an Associated Press report in the Mercury news (Report: Congressman backed defense project critical to donors) a high-ranking California congressman is being fingered for preserving the controversial $8 billion intranet project after accepting a massive donation linked to a project sub-contractor.

Rep. Jerry Lewis, who now chairs the House Appropriations Committee, voted to preserve the intranet project despite pressures on the committee to cut monies from their budget. Rep. Lewis is denying a $130,000 donation from a big investor (Cerebus Capital Management) to one of the projects major sub-contractors (MCI) helped sway him in preserving the funding….

He said he had no knowledge of the connection between the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management and the $8.8 billion project to build a secure computer network for the Navy and Marines until he heard about it from USA Today.

"It is absolutely and unequivocally false to suggest that any decision on funding for the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet was in any way based on a lobbyist's request, or as a favor to someone who was donating campaign funds," Lewis said.

"Neither I nor my staff have recommended adding money to this program - all of the funding approved has been included in the president's budget at the request of the Navy," he said.

Lewis, 71, from Redlands, Calif., chaired the Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on defense in 2003, when the House Armed Services Committee voted to cut 10 percent from the 2004 budget for the Navy-Marine computer project.

The year before, the House Appropriations Committee had noted problems with the program, including cost overruns and delays.Lewis himself was quoted in The Washington Post saying he wasn't satisfied with the project's progress. He also voiced concern about the involvement of MCI, which was a major subcontractor on the project but was involved in an accounting scandal that caused it to file for bankruptcy in the summer of 2002.

But when the defense appropriations subcommittee, which controls defense dollars, passed its 2004 defense spending bill on June 16, 2003, money for the Navy-Marine Corps computer network was preserved.

Lewis said he changed his mind and backed the funding because the Navy asserted that the program's management had improved. On June 26, the full Appropriations Committee also approved the funding. By that time, Cerberus, a hedge fund that invests mainly in companies in or near bankruptcy, owned more than $140 million in stock and bonds of MCI WorldCom.

RSS is already changing the face of the Internet; rocketing blogs to the forefront and cementing the dominant position of portal and news giants such as Yahoo! and CNN. Not surprisingly, playing poorer cousin to their world-facing kin, the corporate portal is now beginning to use RSS, to the benefit of employees and their host organizations.

Michael Rudnick, my colleague and fellow co-host of the Intranet Insider community on Communitelligence.com, believes RSS could in fact change the face of portals.

“Organizations that deploy RSS readers for internal content enable employees to create their own personal news or content update site to keep track of changing information that's relevant or interesting to them,” says Rudnick, the Global Intranet & Portal Practice Leader at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, in his most recent article Comunintelligence.com Communications, Marketing, PR, HR Portal - Blogs. “This is the true definition of a "My Site.”

“Some basic areas where RSS is perfect include employee communications and internal news, HR communications and benefits updates (helpful for annual enrollment information, year end and new year changes), facilities information (very timely in the NY area with the current transit strike affecting business operating hours), management communications, and sales force related content (product updates, customer data, etc.).”

Michael is right. We’re going to see more and more RSS on the intranet. This in fact, could be a blow to the corporate portal vendors. If employees can customize their pages with data feeds using a free client like Feedster or My Yahoo!, then this reduces the attractiveness of an expensive portal solution like Websphere or SharePoint.

Now, freebies like My Yahoo! won’t replace a true, high-value portal with integrated applications, employee directories, etc. But these freebies could dampen the market for some lesser portal vendors. Come to think of it My Yahoo! already offers a corporate portal solution…

CONTINUE READING...

Managing content online content continues to be one of the top issues dogging intranet managers. Employee complaints about not being able to find certain information continues to be a top complaint followed closely by those about content quality.

Quality comes from good writing and management (i.e. cataloging, storing, tagging, etc.). Even the best communicators require refresher courses. For non-communicator employees who are managing content, training is a must – regardless of the content management system, publishing tool or established policies.

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“With the increasing implementation of distributed publishing throughout organisations there is an increasing need to train content providers to help develop a more consistent approach and style for their online content, not just train people on how to use the software,” writes Nick Besseling, a New Zealand-based intranet consultant in Training intranet content providers (thanks for the pointer from James Robertson @ Column Two).

Training workshops are a good forum for educating managers about the dos and don’ts of online content management. Nick provides a 7-point framework for conducting content training workshops:

1. Before the workshop
   Send out pre-workshop questions and an online content article to help get participants into the online content ‘head space’ and start them thinking about issues/problems.
2. Audience and purpose
   Emphasise that the user of the information is the focus of content not the provider or the provider’s manager. This can be a major sticking point to get effective and useful content.
3. Intranet and online content conceptsCover concepts such as the idea that online readers skim/scan, the content triangle/inverse pyramid concept etc. Keep in mind that some of your content providers may have very limited knowledge of what makes online content successful.
4. Writing/online style guidelines
   Cover specific guidelines such as writing short sentences, ‘one idea’ paragraphs, use of tables, images, file types etc. Also cover the fundamentals in your organisation’s writing/communication style guide (get one developed if you don’t have one!). Be sure to highlight anything in the style guide that may clash with effective online content.
5. Discussion and exercises
   Emphasise discussion and hands-on exercises. Get people talking about online content and working together to share ideas and approaches and use these discussions to help understand where your content providers are currently at. Exercises should be based on current intranet content and cover both concepts and specifics as discussed above.
6. Managing participants
   Mix participants up across different business groups and keep numbers limited to a manageable numbers (10 or less), Get people working in pairs during the exercises and avoid domination of the workshop by more experienced participants (but be sure to use them when needed to elicit responses).
7. Cover editing/collating as well as writing
   If (as in many organisations) a lot content comes from existing sources rather than being produced initially for an online environment, put more focus on ‘editing for online’ rather than just writing.

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Search is an absolute essential to any successful intranet. And not just a search engine, an effective search engine. If its less than stellar, the search engine will become a distraction and detraction where the most common employee complaint will continue to be "I can't find anything!"

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While the key to effective search is more focused on the rules and processes (effective page titles, strong links, keywords, summaries, meta data, etc.), the supporting technology shouldn't be overlooked.

Google is now retailing Google Mini at an entry price of $2,995 -- a highly effective solution that indexes up to 100,000 documents. Prescient Digital Media now uses Google Mini on a client site (www.HealthyOntairo.com) and we're impressed by the feature set and ability to customize results and presentation. Particularly great is Google Mini's ability to interpret misspelled words (which you can set and hardcode yourself) and the Advanced Search options (try misspelling diabetes).

To meet demand, Google has now released two larger Minis: a second that finds up to 200,000 internal documents for $5,995; a third that indexes 300,000 documents $8,995. The full Google appliance for larger intranets starts at $30,000 and is reported to increase to as much as $600,000 for killer size intranets.

The Google Mini comes with one year of support, software updates, and hardware replacement coverage. It can be purchased online, directly from the Google Store with a credit card, check or purchase order. For more information, see http://mini.google.com.

Google Mini is a definite must for any organization looking at replacing their existing search capability, but don't forget the emphasis on rules and process...

It’s long been touted that the corporate portal is the true future of the intranet. From Microsoft’s perspective, the future is Sharepoint.

For those that missed the news (which is really no longer news anymore since the first word last year), MS is merging MS Content Management Server (CMS) and SharePoint into a single group. While the products may likely be kept separate (though MS has made no announcement on this yet), it will be seamlessly integrated form the user perspective – with a single user interface (see More on Microsoft’s plans).  

This is no average product announcement or program for MS. MS is reputedly spending US$300 million on this project with a full-time team of nearly one thousand people. Big plans for the future of the corporate intranet.

Arpan Shah is an MS honcho who blogs about the future of Microsoft SharePoint & CMS. In a recent blog entry (see Microsoft CMS Futures) Shah highlights the future plans for the merging of these two products into a single group or as he puts it, an “integrated set of technologies built on top of WSS (Windows SharePoint Services)” “We're careful not to say SPS "12" or CMS 2007, because packaging and licensing decisions have not been made,” says Shah. “While these technologies will be technically integrated (same development, deployment and end-user experience), we have not made decisions on how these will be packaged.”

The real bonus to users is new functionality… details (abridged) from Shah:

Content Contributor(gets better)
In Office "12", there are two primary ways for someone to author content just like in CMS 2002: via the web browser and by using a rich client, like Word. From a web browser perspective, the edit control is richer than the out-of-the-box control in CMS 2002. It has features like spell-checking, table formatting, styling and the ability for content contributors to author and use "reusable" HTML fragments - a commonly requested feature. Is it better than the Telerik control? I'm not sure how the Telerik control will progress in the Office "12" timeframe.

Rich Client Authoring - this is a much more flexible feature in the Office "12" timeframe. Out of the box, we will convert a variety of file formats to HTML (docx, wordml, xml) and provide the flexibility for customers and partners to develop their own converters. So, for example, if someone develops a PDF converter, they can enable content contributors to convert a PDF to an HTML page… Imagine a scenario where you collaborate on a case study and then want to publish it - you can now do that all very seamlessly. Another added benefit is that the system tracks where it's been published from and if it's changed from the source. So, for example, if you go to a page that has been authored using Word, for example, it will tell you that it's been published from word and will allow you to republish from the original doc OR change the page directly. Now every time you go back to the web page, it will tell you it's different from the word doc.

Template Designer(new role)
In CMS 2002, developers develop templates using Visual Studio. In Office "12", we've effectively introduced a new role allowing non-developers to create "templates" (known as Page Layouts in Office "12") using FrontPage "12". Template designers can add controls, web parts and placeholder controls (known as field controls).

Developer (more focused)
Developers develop the custom field controls (think custom placeholder controls), controls (server or user controls) and web parts. They don't have to worry about design anymore.

IT Pro (gets better)
We've added several great features making it easier for the IT Pro. For starters, there are no client installs needed for any of the roles. The edit control is a DHTML control unlike CMS 2002 which is an active-x control. Also, site manager functionality is now web-based. So if you want to add a new administrator, they don't have to install site manager.

We've also done a lot of work with deployment. Through a web-based UI, IT Pros can schedule deployments. You can schedule deployments, publish to multiple web server farms if you wanted to and you can provide your content contributors to effectively "instantly deploy" certain pages. For example, if there's a specific article that needs to get published "now", you can set that up. It's an out of the box feature.

Workflow (gets much better)
In CMS 2002, we have 1-2 step approval that is implicit based on channel security settings. There are several samples available on http://www.gotdotnet.com and several great partners that provide integrated workflow functionality. In fact, Skelta provides free workflow "lite".

In Office "12", workflow is extensible. Parameterized workflow templates are available out of the box. So if you want to create a mult-step serial or parallel workflow, you can just use one of the out-of-the-box workflow templates. Additionally, you can create your own workflow with FrontPage "12". This workflow functionality is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) for which WSS "v3" is the host.

Integrated Search
Office "12" Enterprise Search will be integrated with CMS functionality in Office "12". We're making a lot of investments in search and this will be available out of the box.

Multi-lingual Publishing
One of the customer asks from our global customers was out-of-the-box multilingual support. CMS 2002 supports unicode and is very extensible. Customers created localized versions of the web author console. In Office "12", we provide more out of the box multi-lingual publishing capabilities.

Besides support unicode and being built on the WSS multi-lingual infrastructure (different sites in different languages), we're going to have a feature that allows you to have multiple sites in different languages. For example, if you have a section of your site called Press Releases and you want to have Press Releases in different languages (Spanish and French), you can define a source and multiple targets. By defining a source and multiple targets, the system will keep the pages in sync between the source and the different targets. This works one way (source -> target) and respects workflow on the different targets. So for example, if I add a new press release in the English section (source), after it's approved, it will create the same pages in the Spanish and French sections.

Integrated Office "12" SharePoint ServersI briefly mentioned that we are investing in ECM, Portal, Collab, Search, BI and Forms features in Office "12" SharePoint Servers. Again, these investments will be -technically- integrated providing the same development, deployment and end-user experiences. So from a technology standpoint, the next version of CMS functionality will be integrated with a whole set of other technologies allowing you to deploy an end-to-end solution. For example, ECM consists of Document Management and Records Management functionality as well.

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Fifty corporate podcsts. 50,000 employee downloads in the past two months.

Though business is certainly a driver, not all IBMs podcasts are business. IBMers like Ethan Rand McCarty of IBM’s strategic communications team are podcasting on the intranet: "Ethan McCarty's Rock and Roll Podcast."

According to another insightful article by Julie Moran Alterio in the Journal News (Podcasts a hit inside IBM) IBM is podcastinga storm…

McCarty, part of IBM's strategic communications team, is one of the people helping lead IBM into the new world of blogging and podcasting.

IBM started to encourage employees to read and create the online journals known as blogs last May. Shortly after, IBM started pushing podcasts — subscription-based audio downloads that can be listened to on laptops, iPods or other MP3 players.

IBMers like McCarty are recording podcasts on the company intranet.

In addition, the investor relations department has created a podcast for the public called "IBM and the Future of..." with installments that explore how technology will affect activities such as driving, shopping, banking and online gaming.

Ben Edwards said the podcast, like the annual report that he and his colleagues create, gives investors a sense of where IBM is headed strategically.

"The podcasts offer an opportunity to communicate with our investors on a more frequent basis," Edwards said.

*   *   *

All IBMers can record podcasts using the built-in microphone in their company laptops. Simple online tutorials make it easy even for novices.

One of the first podcasts was a tutorial on how to start a blog. Other podcasts are on such topics as work force diversity and career development.

At least one executive is using a podcast to replace a conference call. Tim Carroll, a vice president in IBM's supply chain, used to lead a weekly call with the 7,000 employees around the world who report to him. The phone bill for the call was hundreds of thousands of dollars a year…

Read IBM’s Podcast Guidelines(compliments of Toby Bloomberg).

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