How do you connect 1.6 million employees, franchisees and suppliers in 118 countries? Build a really big, scalable intranet portal.

In 2001, McDonalds looked to build a new enterprise intranet that included multiple sites in multiple languages. Other needs included:

• Integration with existing systems including FileNet, Oracle, Netegrity and Verity among others
• Extensive brand and digital asset management (multimedia)
• Enhanced, global content management

McDonald’s considered several technology platforms including:

• Day Software Communiqe
• Yahoo/Tibco Portal
• FileNET
• Netegrity SiteMinder
• Oracle Application Server

McDonald’s chose Day Communique and has since built “several significant applications” on Communique, and extend the platform to include the external .com website.

Communique is a high-end content management system (CMS) that is beginning to resemble a true portal solution. The ContentBus system is a content repository (JSR-170) that provides a common vehicle for disparate content sources.

“We continue with Day because of its flexibility,” says Steve Wilson, Senior Director of Global Web Communications at McDonald's, as interviewed on the Shared Insights podcast. “And its content bus which allows us to connect content on the back end. And it’s a highly user-friendly tool… a person with very limited computer skills can be up and running with a website and managing pages in a morning.

McDonald’s intranet portal home page

McDonald’s intranet also features personalization and portal tools for employees.  McDonald’s intranet delivers specific content for specific audiences, based on the users' role (log-in profile). Common elements including the design, navigation and page layout, and some specific content is displayed on all pages, but localized content is targeted to individual role (see the Day’s McDonald’s case study).   

“The ability to centralize (content management) and take out extraneous, other tools (technology)… has saved us a considerable amount of money – both in licensing fees as well as training costs,” says Wilson, on the SharedInsights podcast. “It also helps us focus our (content) community.

According to the integrator, Acquity Group, the intranet CMS has “reduce(d) intranet content publishing costs by $1MM annually and improved field employees' productivity by 5 percent. In addition, timely information can now be created and delivered in nine languages around the world.” 

Now 5 years-old, the McDonad’s intranet has grown its intranet authors from 5 to 400. And delivered in 9 different languages, content clearly is a big priority for McDonald’s.

McDonald’s Japan Intranet Portal View

ALSO READ:

 McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs

Live by the sword; die by the sword. It’s an all too familiar quote, and lesson, that many of us have learned by experience. Politicians and writers know this lesson well.

Blogging is a powerful new sword that exacts and enables great freedoms and celebrity, but it also can violently swing back at its wielder with greater viciousness. Debbie Weil knows this well and has been slashed by the darker underside of the blade that is not always seen when it is exacting great things. The well known blogger and affeciando, popularly known as the “Mona Lisa of blogging”, has developed (by all accounts) a very successful business from blogging and consulting about blogging.

Recently Weil was hit very hard by critics who were quick to show her the blade when she promoted a client’s blog, GlaxoSmithKline’s alliConnect blog (a blog for GlaxoSmithKline’s new weight loss drug, alli). Her critics were quick to pounce and were harsh and ruthless, as I revealed in my writings of August 7 (see Flogging). Weil was further upset by my writings relating the exchanges of her critics and called me directly to express her unease. Weil was polite and cordial, but notably upset with me and my piece.

Like Mark Cuban and I the week before (see The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Intranet), we agreed to disagree on some points, but agreed on a great deal of many things as it relates to blogging and my writings. Weil’s call to me takes guts, integrity and depth of character – traits well exemplified by her. It’s well worth noting that she could have sent me a flame email, responded with an angry comment to the blog, or launched into a verbal tirade. She did none of this and we had a very respectful conversation for about 30 minutes.

Weil was upset, not just with me, and very likely more upset with some of her harsher critics, in the blogosphere. She was very professional but passionate and I could her hear the depth of her dejection on the subject of her critics. I honestly wanted to just give her a big hug through the phone. She’s paying the price that all celebrities, politicians and writers frequently pay – getting hit by words that have made her a well-known entity.

The blogosphere is the ultimate tool and example of freedom of speech. Anyone can blog and influence many thousands. What makes the blogosphere so successful and powerful (universality), makes it dangerous and vicious too. You won’t find me slinging mud at other people, but you will find me disagreeing and debating others in what I hope is a respectful tone (beauty is in the eye of the beholder). But I could write just about anything I wanted – that is the nature and power of the blogosphere.

As I said in my writings before, I don’t know Weil… but after talking with her I’m certain she is a fine person and hope she considers me a colleague (as I would be honored to call her). And Weil, like Cuban and myself, also painfully knows that with freedom of speech comes great power, and that power has a double-edge that is both nice and nasty.

Flogs are funny. Flogs demonstrate just how dumb some people can be. How do these people ascend to the jobs they have?!? Do they really think they can get away with it?!?

Flogs are defined as a “fake blog” (as in a sales or marketing gimmick site masquerading as a fan site or genuine consumer blog, and authored by a PR or marketing hack).

Perhaps the most famous flog is the disastrous Walmarting Across America hack job, written by two Walmart “fans” who drove across America in an RV blogging about the Walmarts they visited. While two people did in fact leap from Walmart to Walmart, they were paid very well to do so (and this was not disclosed in the blog). It was a PR stunt allegedly cooked-up by Walmart’s PR firm Edelman PR (see Wal-Mart's Jim and Laura: The Real Story in Business Week).

Can you imagine a company pulling off a flog on the intranet, and getting caught? Tell me that wouldn't implode employee morale.

I express my fondness for the Trailer Park Boys, the "I'm Tom Cruise and I'm in Love" flog, and name drop a bit in my full column: Flogging (Content Matters).

PS - Mark Cuban was kind enough to email me aftter my last entry (The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Intranet) where I disagreed with his definition of intranet and his assertion that the intranet is ahead of the Internet. In short, we agreed to disagree. Mark, no hard feelings. Let the debate continue....

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The Intranet Podcast by Toby Ward, from Prescient Digital Media, for the month of August 2007. This podcast is brought to you by www.IntranetBlog.com and is 22 minutes long.

This week Toby discusses portals and Enterprise 2.0. Specifically:

1. The pros and cons of enterprise portal solutions
2. Is intranet personalization dying?
3. Alternatives to intranet personalization
4. Enterprise 2.0 / Intranet 2.0
5. The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Intranet (Toby’s debate with Mark Cuban)

Dowload The Intranet Podcast: Portals & Enterprise 2.0 (August, 2007) to hear this month’s Intranet Podcast (please wait 60 seconds or so for the file to download; more if you don't have high-speed).