In this week’s Intranet Report Podcast I discuss with Tom Marciniak the terrible, the bad and the ugly (17 minutes). From examples of some of the worst intranets to the it’s-so-bad-it’s-funny intranet mistakes.

1. What makes a bad intranet?
2. How do intranets turn out bad?
3. How to fix bad intranets
4. The reason why intranet search sucks

TO LISTEN: visit the Intranet Report Podcast.

If you fail to disclose certain information on a corporate website, or from a corporate e-mail address, in the United Kingdom, you could be fined. Companies in the UK who do not contain regulatory information on their websites and in their e-mail footers (as of January 1, 2007) are in breach of that country’s Companies Act and risk a fine.

Whether or not your organization is in a jurisdiction that has to comply with such legislation the message is clear: with power comes great responsibility. Corporate web and intranet managers need to act responsibly with their content, and act accordingly. If they don’t already exist (or if not in the proper form), the responsibility begins with well developed and promoted policy including:

Read my full article (Ir)responsible content (on Ragan's new Content Matters blog, of which I am one of the co-authors).

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Intranet Report Podcast -- March 15, 2007

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The Intranet Innovation Awards are global awards that celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets. I’ve agreed to lend my name and Prescient Digital Media’s support to these first annual awards as I customarily highlight and regularly document and write about award winning intranets on this site.

The goal of the awards is to recognize innovative intranets (whether large or small), and to share them with the wider intranet community. Uniquely, these awards recognise individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole.

The Intranet Innovation Awards are now open for submissions, which must be received by 15 May 2007. Full details on the awards (including the entry form) are at: http://www.steptwo.com.au/iia/index.html

The Intranet Innovation Awards have been created by Step Two Designs, a recognised thought-leader in intranet strategy and design. These are also truly global awards, supported by a network of intranet-savvy organisations from the US to the UK, Europe and beyond.

“Intranets must innovate in order to prosper; they must constantly grow and evolve to better meet the needs of the organisations they serve,” says Step Two’s James Robertson. “While there can be no single 'best intranet', there are innovative ideas and approaches that warrant recognition.

The Intranet Innovation Awards have therefore been established to celebrate the great work done by intranet teams across the globe, to give them the recognition they deserve.

Gold Awards are given across four different categories, each focusing on a specific aspect of intranets. Platinum Award winners are then chosen to recognise the most extraordinary entries for the year.

These awards are about improving all intranets, by increasing the pace of innovation across the whole of the intranet community. Every idea, no matter how small, adds to our understanding of what it means to have a successful intranet.

Read more about the awards and download the entry form.

Every intranet should have a business case; a justification for being, including metrics that prove its worth. Along with user satisfaction, traffic metrics, and ROI, benchmarking information (what others are doing) is also important to know.

For the best possible data, the 2007 Global Intranets Survey (hosted and conducted by Jane McConnell) needs your participation. If you are an intranet manager or consultant then it’s in your best interest to spend 30 - 60 minutes completing this survey.  Every respondent will receive a complete report of the findings – which is very good intelligence for your intranet business case.

To participate in this year’s2007 Global Intranets Survey pleaseContact Jane McConnell.

The 2006 Survey revealed a number of key trends:

• 13% said their senior management perceived the intranet as "business critical
• 55% said their employees would be disturbed in their work if the intranet "went down" for 1 to 2 hours
• 60% say the main obstacle preventing the intranet from achieving its potential is that it is "too communication" and lacks integrated applications
• 70% say that a "lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet" slows down strategic decision making
• 47% expect their intranet budgets to increase over the next 2 years
• Only 26% are required to measure ROI to justify new or current investments.
• Only 28% have implemented internal blogs and/or external blogs and/or wikis

Take the 2007 Global Intranets Survey by contacting Jane McConnell.

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(BANFF, AB) One of the most common questions I get at conferences is, “Do you think we should start blogging?” I’m tempted to answer, “How should I know? Why not ask me whether or not your company should sell soap?”

Speaking at the annual Go Media conference here in Banff, Alberta, I asked the audience how many people read blogs. Three-quarters of the audience put their hands up. When I asked how many people read blogs 18-months ago, only a handful of people kept their hands-up. Blogs have come a long way in a very short time, but they’re not for everyone. In short, whether or not your company – or your executives – should blog depends on the company and the willingness of employees to read a blog.

Here are some guidelines for launching an intranet blog:

• Ensure you or your executive(s) have something to say, and write in a conversational manner
• Ensure your employees have an interest and appetite for reading a blog
• Develop a content focus (e.g. strategy, innovation, “What keeps me up at night”)
• Encourage employees to join the dialogue by posting comments and questions
• Write and blog regularly (e.g. 2 or 3 times per week or as much or as little as the audience demands)
• Write for the web (not for print): keep it short, succinct and break up blocks of text with bullets, sub-headers and tight paragraphs

My number one suggestion: don’t force it. Blogging is not for everyone, and a lot of people don’t want to read their own company blogs. Don’t believe the hype of the so-called blogging experts – listen to your employees and they’ll tell you what they would and wouldn’t read (either by formal research or by trial-and-error).

RELATED READING:

Top 7 Tips To Write an Effective Business Blog

Case study: PNM Resources CEO blog

IBM leads corporate blogging pack

Study: Intranet blogging on the rise

McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs

ON A PERSONAL NOTE: My baby girl (now 13 months) is walking all over now. And she usually makes a b-line for the stairs to climb up and down – it’s the toddler feat of strength. Now if she would only sleep through the night more than once-in-a-blue moon. She’d pretty darn cute though… but not so much at 2:40am.

Someone please save me from this horrible Windows Vista. What a brutal mistake. I absolutely detest Vista. I’ve never been a Mac user but I’m considering it now… and I’m not the only one. Windows Vista is the greatest thing to happen to Mac since iPod.

After a very long, full day and my conference presentation (and panel discussion) I bolted from the conference (in Banff) at 5pm to climb Tunnel Mountain, on the south side which is virtually free of snow (far better than the north facing hike through the snow on Mt. Sulpher the night before). The elk came as close as six feet and wanted to eat the grass from my hand, but thought better of it. Smart cookies. Give the idiot hiker a grade of T – as in tourist (stupid tourist).

Upon reaching the top I heard a man yelling. A second yell of agony triggered a rescue response in me despite the fact it was past 6pm, -5 C, and a strong wind and light snow was kicking-up. At first I thought it might be kids somewhere below but if someone was hurt up there then I don’t believe there was anyone else around but me and some elk. I skirted a small trail along the summit ridge and called-out to the voice, “Hello?!?! Do you need help?!?!” to which I received a reply: “No! Just blowing off steam!” Alllllrighty then.

Fearing an encounter with a shaggy, crazed societal mountain hermit so I high-tailed it down – a little too quick. Up top there’s little more than elk trails so it’s easy to get off the beaten path and I ended up going down a chute that left me looking over a 1500 foot ledge to the bottom. I had to return to the summit ridge and to the terrain of the deranged, steam-blowing mountain psychotic. At this point I’d convinced myself of the worst: an articulate Bigfoot or Charlie Manson disciple was stalking out an intranet consultant to add to his list of high alpine kills  (potential headline: “Crazed mountain man guts stupid tourist”). The elk trail looked pretty good at this point. I beat my way down despite the pungent threat to the soles of my shoes. Shaken but not stirred I made it back for the opening conference reception (only a little late), and without any knife wounds or elk bites.

Lesson learned: climbing with a buddy in the Rockies is a good thing (or pack a real big knife).

NHL notes: Detroit is supposedly the best team, 5 points ahead of Vancouver. But Vancouver sports the best record since Christmas and man-handled Detroit on Saturday... GM’s would do well to never sign menaces like Chris Simon and Jordan Tootoo to another NHL contract... Either or both Martin Brodeur and Roberto Luongo could break the NHL record for most wins by a goalie in a season (47 – set by Bernie Parent).

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(BANFF, AB) I think Sharepoint is definitely the category killer for portals and content management systems and the intersection of both kinds of products. But I’m not a real fan of the product. I think its too simplistic and becoming too broad (but it works for some, but not for all organizations). So broad in fact that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted that he sees Sharepoint as the new operating system (OS) for the middle tier.

One of my team (thanks Julian) came across this column on Info World (see

Sharepoint: Microsoft's new operating system):

I've been beating on the Sharepoint drum for nearly two years now, but this is the first time I've seen anyone outside the ECM industry think along the same lines. Sharepoint is very clearly the future of Microsoft. And, not coincidentally, it is the future of how Microsoft locks customers into its software (benevolently or malevolently - you choose).

Mary Jo Foley writes:

My favorite question during the Q&A session at the end of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's Convergence conference keynote address on March 15 sounded deceptively simple...."With all the hoopla here at the conference around SharePoint Server, is it correct to think of SharePoint as almost like an OS (operating system)"?

Bingo.

Microsoft officials increasingly are talking up "Software + Services," as opposed to "Software as a Service" in explaining Microsoft's future. So how does Microsoft keep the growing family of business services it is introducing tethered to on-premise software?

SharePoint Server is the answer. Not Windows. Not Windows Server. Not Office. SharePoint.

Ballmer told the Convergence questioner he was dead-on in his thinking.

"SharePoint is the definitive OS or platform for the middle tier," Ballmer explained. It is the "missing link" (my words, not his) between personal productivity and line-of-business applications.

I like to think of Sharepoint as the tool used to make the document formats debate irrelevant. Open the formats, but close the document/content network, and we're back at the beginning, with many years of milking monopoly rents.

There is no future for Documentum. Vignette. Interwoven. Filenet. Etc. But there is a future for Sharepoint, and for the open source competition. (Open source ECM has become highly strategic to a growing number of Global 2000 companies.) Sharepoint is exploding into the enterprise - $0 to $1B in just four years.

The only thing that will stop it, and thereby keep enterprise content where it belongs - in enterprise hands - is open source.

Interesting that this columnist thinks that the likes of Vignette, FileNet, etc. are working on borrowed time. I couldn’t agree more. Either the company serves a niche or it’s Microsoft, IBM or Oracle. Vignette can’t compete with Microsoft in the long-term trying to be everything to everyone.

Speaking of Microsoft, I’m now on Windows Vista… and words alone can’t express how much I despise it!!!! I’m only biding my time now until I find the time to remove it and all my files to reinstall Windows XP. Vista is NOT more Apple-like – it’s far more complicated and extraordinarily difficult to use. Oh, it’s certainly a lot more pretty, but it’s painfully unfriendly.

The Intranet Report Podcast for the week of March 15, 2007. On this week's podcast: 

-          the British Airways intranet

-          improving intranet search

-          photo sharing on the intranet

-          curing e-mail addiction.

TO LISTEN: please download or listen online Intranet Report Podcast -- March 15, 2007.

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The 1980s and 1990s were tough times for British Airways. The new millennium was not kind either when in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some analysts began to wonder if BA would survive at all and talked openly about bankruptcy for more than one airline.

Since 2002, the company has re-engineered an impressive turnaround with an aggressive focus on cost-cutting and productivity. In late 2002 its share price had slumped to below £100; today BA’s share price is hovering around £500.

One catalyst for change during the impressive turnaround, in a hugely challenging business and environment, is the BA intranet. In 2001, BA put in place an ambitious plan for a low-tech intranet with lofty targets. Building on what some would call an antiquated platform, Lotus Notes and Domino, BA built an intranet that is delivering a measured value of £55 (more than US$100 million) per year.

“I have to admit I do get envious when I hear about all the technology that others (companies) are using,” confesses Alan Huish, BA’s manager of employee self-service when asked about using Lotus Notes. “But you cannot argue with our results.”

Read my complete case study feature Low-tech, high-value intraneton Communitelligence.com

The police in West Yorkshire, England, are using a simple intranet site to help catch bad guys (see West Yorkshire Police intranet helps solve crimes across the region):

"A new section of West Yorkshire Police’s own internal intranet site is proving to be a great success in solving crimes across the region.

Called ‘Caught on Camera’, the internal web page provides a central place for all photographs of unidentified people wanted for questioning in relation to particular crimes.

Officers across the Force are encouraged to undertake regular checks of the site, feeding any information they have back to a supervisor.

If an image remains on the site for over 4 weeks, it is also picked up by Crimestoppers who will then consider it for media appeals.

Since the site was set up almost 12 months ago, close to 350 people have been identified, with many leading to prosecutions.

Only last week, the site recorded 100,000 hits from visitors within the Force.

Andrew McDonnell of the Force’s Imaging Unit says it has gone from strength to strength.

"This is another example of how we can use simple technology in the fight against crime. Every officer in the Force has access to these images, so if an offender is known to officers in one area, and commits crime in a different area, they will not escape detection"

"Being able to access these images on hand held terminals while on the beat also means we are not taking officers away from front-line duties"

"In addition to exposing unidentified offenders to every officer in the Force, we can also use the images on our Facial Recognition system, which matches the face to known offenders on our database"

"The proliferation of CCTV in the UK is widespread, and many offences are captured on camera. This internal system allows us to make best use of these images and bring offenders to justice"