The headline from a republished column on DMW written by web aficionado, maverick blogster and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

“For some reason the fact that intranets can significantly outperform Internets and in particular THE Internet is a shocking concept. It shouldn't be,” writes Mark in IntraNets vs InterNets. “It’s a stagnant consumer platform (the Internet). We switched to browsers for most of our PC activity. We are getting to the point where the browser on the net as a platform is becoming stagnant.”

Cuban’s biggest complaint is the lack of quality video and multimedia on the Internet, and the websites that crash and timeout when downloading video. In theory, the intranet can do a much better job. Therefore, the Internet is Dead, Long Live the Intranet.

Cuban rightly asserts that most Internet throughput speeds are actually much less than 1 MBS (in North America. In Europe and Japan throughput speeds are offen much faster) – even though the advertised number is 3 MBS or up to 10 MBS. However, on the corporate intranet, it is possible to soon have throughput speeds of up to 100 MBS. An equivalent rate on the Internet may be many, many years away.

The nasty truth is that the vast majority of intranets feature little to no video and multimedia. Why? Because they don’t have the pipes and the infrastructure to carry and deliver video without crashing the intranet. And more pipes and infrastructure cost money. Why would executives invest more money in a cost center like the intranet when potential customers on the Internet are far more important than employees?

Cuban therefore is talking about the ideal intranet, or for the most part, the theoretical intranet. Yes, some companies have been providing rich multimedia on their intranet for many years. But they are a rare exceptions to the rule.

Not to burst Cuban’s bubble, but the Internet is a smorgasbord of video that has exploded in the past year. In case you’ve been locked in a closet or a Taliban cave, there’s this little website called YouTube. It’s the fourth most visited website on the Internet even though it’s only existed for a little more than a couple of years.

In theory, Cuban is mostly correct. In theory, communism works.

Intranet Blog is an intranet news blog featuring best practices, case studies and everything intranet -- plus the relevant musings (but often irrelevant musings) of Toby Ward, a senior intranet consultant and Founder and CEO of Prescient Digital Media.

In addition to editing Intranet Blog, Toby is the CEO and Founder of Prescient Digital Media. Prescient consists of Internet and intranet consultants for hire that plan and build highly effective intranets and websites.

Toby has had the pleasure and good fortune to work with dozens of intranets and many more interactive clients including:

• Amgen
• Atomic Energy of Canada
• BC Hydro
• Bell Canada
• Boston Scientific
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
• Federal Reserve Bank 
• Gartner
• HSBC
• Intrawest (Playground)
• Manulife Financial
• Mastercard
• Nintendo
  
• Ontario Government
• Pepsi
• RBC Financial Group
• Schneider Electric
• Sodexo
  
• Sprint PCS
• Thomson Financial
• Vancouver Coastal Health
• WestJet
• and many others. 

A broadcast journalist turned consultant, Toby founded and launched Prescient in early 2001.

Toby has contributed to two books, has his own in the works, and is a recognized expert on effective web planning, communication, benchmarking and best practice measurement (ROI). Toby is the author of Finding ROI, a leading study conducted on intranet Return on Investment that included participants such as KPMG, Scotiabank, Volvo, Shell, Royal Bank, New York Life, HP and others. Leading companies such as the New York Times, Intel, PBS, the Bank of Canada and many others have bought his white paper that has been read by thousands.

Toby is a regular writer for an assortment of magazines and is popular speaker in North America and Europe at conferences by the Conference Board, IQPC, IABC, Ragan, and others. He is also a regular blogger at IntranetBlog, GetStrategic, eHealth News and Communitelligence.com. You can also read his articles at CorporateWebsite.com and Ragan.com.

He has led Prescient Digital Media and clients to win 15 awards in the past two years from the International Association of Business Communicators, Canadian Public Relations Society, a the 2004 Webby Award for Best Government + Law Website on the Internet (for HealthyOntario.com). 

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please download the free white paper, Finding ROI.

You can contact or hire Toby and Prescient Digital Media please phone  416.926.8800 or via email at Contact Us.

CRITERIA FOR COVERAGE OR GETTING 'INK' ON INTRANETBLOG.COM:

If you or your organization has a good piece of research, a case study with a screenshot(s) and some form of KPI attached to it (some metric), or just a plain good ol' story, then I'll write about it (how much we write depends on the quality of the story or case study -- the more marketing-speak and smell of a blatant sales pitch, the less we write. We're okay with a soft sales pitch if its contained in the context of the aforementioned research, case study or good ol' story).

We do not however (with a very odd exception) cover product launches, special events or white paper releases if the above criteria are not met. On occasion however, I will cross-promote a launch or an event with a piece if the above criteria is met, or if I'm personally attending or addressing said event and I provide a sneak preview or advance teasers.

IntranetBlog.com contains no advertising or sales whatsoever (that includes you Google Ads) until such time as we get foolish and greedy. It will continue however to promote the research, and findings, and those events that support the two, of its principal author, Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media.

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Not all search engines are created equal… but they mostly are.

“New search appliances claim to be uniquely adapted to meet enterprise needs,” writes Ben Dupont in Analysis: Enterprise Search for Network Computing magazine. “We tested eight enterprise search products and analyzed the technology's security and architectural implications. Our take: The math just doesn't add up.”

As I’ve written many times before, an ineffective search engine has less to do with the technology, and more to do with people and process and the ways and means by which content is categorized and tagged (see Fixing the sucky search problem and The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part I : Search and The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy). This won’t however discourage the search engine companies from selling you.

I love the "live search" capability of the Plone search engine that we use on www.PrescientDigital.com. It starts to display results before you hit the "search" button.

Search results are automatically refined or updated in a drop-down menu as you type words into the search query box.

Insurance group Royal & SunAlliance has replaced its intranet search engine with Google's Search Appliance, which according to Silicon.com (see Royal & Sun Alliance Googles the intranet) has dramatically reduced search times on the corporate intranet.

“According to Royal & SunAlliance knowledge manager Tony Brierley, the replacement has reduced search times from between five and seven minutes to between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds.

The intranet is used by the company's underwriters to pull up information when dealing with brokers' enquiries. Underwriters require information such as rates or company policy guidelines that is stored on the intranet.

 

Brierley told silicon.com the company had a legacy of different search tools within the intranet, which is based on a Lotus Notes backbone. Interoperability problems between these systems slowed searches to an unacceptable level.” 

I’ve never heard of an intranet search engine taking 5 – 7 minutes to process a search query, but this is good salesmanship.

Ironically, Dupont in his analysis of the search engines is very complimentary of IBM’s OmniFind search engine, which is completely free, and obviously works well in a Lotus and Domino environment.

One engine Dupont didn’t review is the highly impressive Autonomy, which now eschews the search engine term as a simplistic label for its powerful IDOL server. Autonomy IDOL features “hyperlinking, agents, summarization, taxonomy generation, retrieval, channels, clustering, eduction, profiling, collaboration and alerting.” It denotes the difference between it and traditional search engines as “meaning-based computing.”

Autonomy distances itself from lesser search products by underscoring the key difference:  “keyword search engines for example cannot comprehend the meaning of information; these products were developed simply to find documents in which a word occurs.”

“Some of the key functionality of Meaning-Based Computing such as automatic hyperlinking and clustering are simply not available in keyword search engines,” states the Autonomy home page. “For example, automatic hyperlinking which connects users to a range of pertinent documents, services or products that are contextually linked to the original text requires that the meaning of the original document is fully understood. Similarly for computers to automatically collect, analyse and organize information computers have to be able to extract meaning. Only Meaning-Based Computing Systems can do this.”

All search engines were not created equal. However, notwithstanding some great marketing, salesmanship and the “Meaning-Based Computing” approach of Autonomy, they are remarkably similar.

RELATED READING:

Intranet vs Internet Search 

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part I : Search

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy

Well Beyond the Search Box

Next generation inference engines

Analysis: Enterprise Search

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Mysterious, unidentified sources are behind some very targeted attacks of employees of the U.S. government, some defense contractors and other companies in the transportation industry.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Government, contractors hit in targeted attack, the attack was intended to yield “password information for hundreds of Internet and intranet” sites – namely some very specific sites relating to U.S. defense and transportation (both private and public sector). Experts are not ruling out a terrorist connection:

“The malicious code behind the attacks was first detected by computer intrusion prevention vendor Prevx Ltd. on July 5. In total, the criminals were able to cull 200M bytes information from about 500 computers, including password and login data, Prevx said.

 

All but one of the computers was located in the U.S., and many of the computers that were infected were associated with air transportation, according to Mel Morris, CEO of Prevx. "This was a well-coordinated attack by someone wanting to get information on the related sites."

 

PCs at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), American Airlines Inc. and DOT contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. all were compromised, Morris said.

 

If DOT systems were compromised, the department is unaware of the situation. "We haven't found any record of a problem," a DOT spokeswoman said Tuesday.

 

Prevx obtained a sample of the Trojan used in the attacks on Friday of last week. By Saturday, they had tracked down a Web site, hosted by Yahoo Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, where information from the compromised PCs was dropped. Because Prevx found a "massive amount" of job applications on the Web site used by the criminals, the company believes that victims may have downloaded the malicious software while thinking they were applying for a job.

 

That Web site, which had probably been hacked by the criminals behind the scam, was shut down on Tuesday, Morris said. It hosted about 200M bytes of password information, and log-files on the server showed the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the infected PCs.

 

Victims of the Trojan, calledWin32.PSWSteal.Gen, are told that their hard drive has been encrypted and that they will need to pay US$300 to for a decryption tool.

 

Morris believes this extortion threat is actually a ruse designed to conceal the attacker's true motivation: data gathering. "We think the ransomware is to point anyone investigating this down the wrong alley," he said.

 

Morris said he is troubled that such a high percentage of the infected PCs are related to the transportation sector, which has been the target of terrorist attacks."

The key lesson: do not open attachments or links to unknown websites from unsolicited email purporting job opportunities.

Read the complete article: Government, contractors hit in targeted attack.

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There are many intranets that have been built in-house by the organization’s own people. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, HP are just some that have been featured on IntranetBlog.com. Most of these however are technology companies that are highly web savvy and have had a constantly evolving intranet for more than 15 years.

There are many advantages to building or redesigning an intranet with internal staff resources:

·         Costs less cash out of pocket

·         Internal stakeholders are forced to learn the ropes

·         Internal jobs are reinforced

The disadvantages of building or redesigning an intranet with only internal staff are obvious:

·         Lack of skill and experience

·         Lack of people to execute

·         Internal politics on what and how to do it

·         Lack of available time to execute

Many organizations however don’t have great resources or experienced staff that know what it takes to build a great intranet (see Good to great intranet). Hiring an external consultant makes sense for many that face some of the above hurdles. However, an Internet consultant is not an intranet consultant. A web design firm has deep creative skills, but rarely has any business acumen and intranet expertise. A big-five consulting firm has very smart people but is very expensive.

So what should you look for in an intranet consultant? Here’s 10 questions to ask potential consultants or intranet consulting firms:

1-     How many intranets have you worked on?

2-     How long have you been in business?

3-     How well do you understand our organization / our business?

4-     Provide a written understanding of our needs / requirements.

5-     Provide client intranet case studies.

6-     Provide intranet client references.

7-     Provide bios of the proposed consultants.

8-     Provide detailed pricing

9-     Provide documentation of your project methodologies.

10-Provide evidence of vendor neutrality / technology neutrality or evidence of experience with the organization’s chosen technology.

Some things to look for and to be cautious about:

ADDITONAL READING:

Hiring an intranet consultant

About the author: Toby Ward is an intranet consultant (Internet consultant too) and the founder of Prescient Digital Media. He has worked with and improved many, many company intranets including Amgen, HSBC, Mastercard, Manulife, PepsiCo, Royal Bank, etc. Toby and his company are consultants for hire and can build your intranet or improve an existing intranet You may contact this intranet consultant directly via the Prescient Digital Media website or email him at: toby{at}prescientdigital{dot}com.

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“Portals still effectively link together concepts of identity, application integration, access to content, personalization, and search. But increasingly, we’re seeing interest in alternative ways to deliver applications to information workers, making it unlikely that portals will ever become the single employee destination site many anticipated they would be,” says Matthew Brown, an analyst focused on the enterprise portals market for Forrester Research.

In my column, Is the personalized intranet portal dying?, I discussed the lack of personalization adoption by employees who use or have access to their intranet portals that feature personalization options. A 5 – 20% adoption rate is normal. This for a technology that, despite the hype, is likely only available in approximately 10% or less of medium to large organizations in North America.

It’s not surprising then that some of the new Web 2.0 technology including RSS and mashups are beginning to undermine expensive portal solutions and the concept of intranet personalization.

“Given the technology trends at work — new methods of integration via programmable thick clients, widgets, gadgets, RSS feeds, and more — it’s unlikely that companies will continue to look at portal servers as their only choice for application integration,” adds Brown.

In my estimation, if implemented correctly, 70-90% of the desired results delivered by a portal’s integration framework can be achieved by other means. There are a number of different options to expose this information to other users, including linking, aggregating information via RSS, and embedding data or functionality inside the intranet via Portlets.

Microsoft’s Sharepoint 2007 features a suite of new Web 2.0 tools including RSS, blogs, wikis, etc. Oracle’s newest portal product, WebCenter, a separate product from their first and better known portal product Oracle Portal. IBM also well understands the power of Web 2.0. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 features an RSS editor, composite application support and standards-based document editors (also, Sametime 7.5 is to include tabbed chat capabilities, compatibility with Microsoft products and integrated video with chat). Domino will also feature Web Services consumer support, which allows Domino applications to 'call' other web services Although the depth of the integration capabilities by Notes is not yet fully known, and depending on how it is implemented, Notes could render a portal solution mostly redundant.

One of the simplest alternatives to personalization could be represented by the potential of RSS to deliver recently updated content between applications and the intranet. RSS is a XML format for publishing frequently updated content. While it is typically used for blogs and news feeds, it can also be used for publishing any type of regularly updated content, including reports, documents, and other key information.

It is relatively straightforward to integrate information from applications to the intranet using RSS. It’s not true integration in the traditional sense, but key business applications can be configured to output RSS for timely information, such as news items, regular reports and performance indicators. 

Mashups offer a glimpse into the RSS alternative. A mashup is a website that combines content data from more than one source to a common view or home page (portal). Google Maps is an example – it draws all the listings and information from many different sources without having to use an expensive piece of portal technology. These are quite simple to do, and for some represent most of the desired content for integration into a single view or portal.

“Many of the new tools like RSS, AJAX, and others remain relatively immature for the purpose of application integration, and there is less availability of reasonably priced labor around these technologies than there is around portal frameworks,” adds Matthew Brown. “But insofar as these technologies promise lighter-weight, faster integration and composition of applications, they’re worthy of consideration.”

A number of vendors are offering mashup solutions that are not yet alternatives to deep, enterprise level integration, but are alternatives to SOA and portals that are able to aggregate top-level data. Here are just a few of the emerging solutions:

Regardless of their moniker – corporate portal, enterprise information portal, or horizontal portals – enterprise intranet portals are relatively new in a fairly green market (late 1990s). Despite its age however, the market offers extraordinarily complex solutions that tout advanced user personalization, out-of-the-box application integration, and development platforms or framework for building composite applications.

In The future of portals at the turn of the year, I espoused the need for portal vendors to make it easier for organizations to implement personalization. All portal products offer user employee personalization options. In short, personalization allows users to configure elements of their home page and subscribe to different buckets of content or tools (portlets). The alternative to individual personalization is role-based personalization or segmentation (see James Robertson’s Personalisation vs segmentation) or employee profiling where personalization options are determined by your role within the organization and delivered to you based on that roll.

GM's personalized employee portal, mySocrates

However, very few organizations have actually enacted or properly implemented user personalization once they’ve purchased a portal product. Most employee portal implementations feature customization. The difficulty with personalization is that it requires a phenomenal amount of work and planning; the technology component is relatively simple. Organizations that roll-out personalization have to identify and define multiple roles and content and then map all the content to those roles and ensure that the content is provided on an ongoing basis (writing, updating, publishing, formatting, etc.). Even more troublesome is that while employees like the idea of personalization, few will ever use it.

“I am highly skeptical about the value of personalization at an individual level, whether on a website or an intranet,” writes Martin White in his EContent article, Portals Show Sign of Sanity. “My experience, which is entirely anecdotal, is that after the initial excitement of being able to manage the flow of information to the desktop, the user refreshes the personalization profile on an increasing ad-hoc basis, until the time comes when they abandon it altogether. The result is that from that point on, the user is no longer seeing all the information that is relevant to his or her needs, and is likely to make seriously flawed decisions.”