British Telecom, known now as BT, has one of the largest intranets in the world with millions of pages, and 2000 publishers.

BT Intranet case study - Web Access Centre is a very good case study, from the Royal Institute of Blind People (RNIB) of all places, that provides some detail on the intranet with a particular focus on its web accessibility and its “accessibility checker” tool.

"BT’s intranet was launched in 1994 as a cost-saving initiative aimed at reducing the amount of paper and printing in the organisation. Eight years later it is a success story with BT now largely a paperless company managing over 200 processes on-line. Additionally, it has resulted in a huge improvement in BT’s communication capability, positioning it at the cutting edge of information and communication technology. And it has also engaged BT people, making them more efficient, effective and empowered – characteristics that are in line with BT’s overall strategy.

With one of the largest intranets in Europe with millions of pages to be checked by Websight and over 2,000 publishers, it is a case of BT continuing to educate and communicate the benefits of accessibility as well as individual responsibilities to the publishing community."

 Read the full case study BT Intranet case study - Web Access Centre on the RNIB website.

OTHER CASE STUDIES OF NOTE:

"Companies seem to be taking news much more seriously," says Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen-Norman Group in an interview with Richmond.com (Communication at Work).

I have a lot of respect for Dr. Nielsen – he is a guru of usability. However, I’ll respectively disagree with him – companies have little respect or care for their intranet. Unfortunately, looking at the world of intranets through the rose color glasses of the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annual (a.k.a the “best intranets of the year”, which largely judges paper submissions of an intranet written and prepared by the intranet manager who of course is trying to look as good as possible) it is easy to make the assumption that intranets are improving. It’s wishful thinking, and correct with respect to a few that fill out an award submission, but not reality.

I’ve worked with dozens of intranets and my company, intranet consultants Prescient Digital Media, works with a few dozen every year (including past winners of the “best intranets of the year” that often don’t in fact have spectacular intranets). We spend hours surfing and evaluating all (most) aspects of these intranets and do not rely on any paper award submission that focus on what’s best or most attractive about an intranet. We look at and examine the good, the bad and the ugly (including the areas of planning and resources, governance, staffing, content processes, etc.). According to our evaluation scoring methodology, the average intranet receives a score of between 5 or 6 out of 10. And many of these companies have thousands, tens-of-thousands of employees, or more.

Why are most intranets so poor? Because senior management don’t give a damn.

“It amazes me that after 20 years of working in corporate communications, I still run across business people – usually leaders or middle managers – who believe employee communication is a luxury and not a fundamental piece of company infrastructure,” muses Robert J. Holland, who wrote Communication at Work. “These people believe there is no need to ensure workers have any more information than what is minimally required for them to do their jobs.”

Holland’s view, from Richmond, Virginia, is bang-on. A lot of executives pay ‘lip service’ to corporate communications, and its primary delivery vehicle (the intranet), but in truth do very little to live up to their empty promises. This assumption is starkly evident in Jane McConnel’s Global Intranet Trends Report that finds:

Ü      44% of respondents say the intranet is not seen as a priority and is a “serious obstacle”

Ü      40% of respondents say the lack of senior management ownership (stewardship or championing) of the intranet is a serious obstacle

Bingo. The intranet is not a priority in most organizations – and senior management is a serious obstacle.

Of course I sound like a broken record and know I’m preaching to the converted and the thousands of you that read this blog, but it’s worth stressing one more time: intranet managers have to become better sales people. Learn to sell the intranet – or hire an outside intranet consultant who can help you:

Ü      Showcase to executives what a winning intranet looks like

Ü      Secure an executive champion – or three

Ü      Build an effective business case for investing in the intranet

Ü      Sell, sell, sell

Dr. Nielsen deserves, and has earned, a lot of respect and accolades for all his work with respect to Internet, and the corporate intranet. Unfortunately the executive suite and senior management have proven that most companies care little for intranet, and still in fact view it as a cost center. Unless intranet managers can find their sales hats then little will change the minds of executives who, by and large, will not further invest in the corporate intranet or enterprise portal.

To read more about combating complacent executives read Building sustainable leadership support.

RELATED REATING:

Building sustainable leadership support

Intranet change management

Too many executives are screwing your employees

Infant intranets need executive loving

Leading an intranet redesign

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“There are no SAPs of web content management and although IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft have their products, they are lagging rather than dominating the WCM (web content management) market,” says Seth Gottlieb, author of the new Open Source Web Content Management in Java report.

With more than a 1000 CMS solutions on the market (some say more than 2000), and some costing millions to purchase and implement (say nothing of the annual support and licensing costs which can cost up to 30% of the original licensing purchase – invoiced every year!), open source is a booming market. Dozens of open source (free license) solutions are now available with a few leading solutions becoming competitive products to the big name, off-the-shelf vendors.

For an organization looking to escape heavy licensing and support costs offered by commercial CMSs, this report is an important read and guide when considering the appropriate tool for publishing and managing content on your corporate intranet and/or websites. Without the proper and thorough intelligence and analysis of the best possible solutions, selecting a content management tool is often reduced to a dangerous guessing game leading to a potentially perilous and expensive mistake.

”Many buyers in the market now are replacing technology that failed their expectations, are skeptical of commercial products, and are looking for alternatives,” add Gottlieb.

Gottlieb reviews seven leading Java open source WCM solutions with a critical eye from the perspectives of both the business user and techie.

 Source: Open Source Web Content Management in Java, Seth Gottlieb, Content Here

“Buyers of WCM technology quickly become disoriented by the number of options - not just the number of products, but also the different ways to acquire a platform,” adds Gottlieb. “The old question of "build versus buy" seems laughably simplistic when you consider that in addition to buying a commercial product, a company can share the technology by using open source or rent it from a Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor. But whatever they choose, they will be doing a considerable amount of building because the term "out-of-the-box" is generous with most WCM features.”

Among the criteria evaluated, the Open Source WCM report examines each Java solution for:

Ü      solution architecture & development

Ü      integration potential

Ü      usability factors

Ü      presentation & interface

Ü      content editor & WYSIWYG editor

Ü      navigating the repository

Ü      content workflow

Ü      search engine optimization

Ü      user forums (community)

An excerpt of Open Source Web Content Management in Java can be found at http://www.contenthere.net/reports/jwcm-workgroup-1.0-sample.pdf

Purchase the report with a special $150 discount (use discount code: vkndds).

The report can be purchased at http://www.contenthere.net/reports/jwcm.html

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It wasn’t enough to infiltrate your computers with Trojans, disable your website with denial of service attacks, and completely crash your hard drive with worms, now hackers want your printers too – via the intranet.

According to an article in Dark Reading (see The Coolest Hacks of 2007 – Part II) a new breed of nefarious loner has figured a way to hack your intranet and assume control of your printer. Not does the infectious script in through the intranet and take over network printers, they start wasting reams of paper by print spamming – or if it’s also a fax machine, faxing names in your databank!

"Printer spam isn’t something you worry about every day, but one researcher has released a proof of concept for a printer hack using JavaScript that lets an attacker remotely "own" an intranet printer for spamming or other nefarious purposes. (See The Five Coolest Hacks of 2007.)

 

"This kind of added insult to injury: We saw that intranet hacking was possible, and now [attackers] can go after printers to make them perform printer-spamming," says Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, who has done some intranet hacking research of his own.

 

The attack requires that a user visit a malicious Website that contains the "bad" JavaScript. Then the attacker can use an HTTP Post command to print to the victim's internal networked printer, and even send faxes. "Since most printers don’t have any security set, it is possible to print anything, control the printer, change the print settings and even send faxes," Weaver writes in his paper on the hack."

An interesting post I did a couple of days ago on the free version of Windows Sharepoint Services and the surprising breadth of available features (from Setting-up a free Sharepoint intranet:

Ü      Announcements

Ü      Calendar

Ü      Contacts

Ü      Tasks

Ü      Projects

Ü      Wiki

Ü      Blog

Ü      Message Board

Ü      Image Library

Ü      Forms Library

Ü      Shared Documents

Ü      Surveys

Ü      Meeting Workspace

Read my full post Setting-up a free Sharepoint intranet at the Intranet Insider blog on Communitelligence.com.

“Collaborative tools are overloading employees and killing productivity—to the tune of $588 billion a year, according to a January study by Basex, a collaboration technologies consulting firm,” writes Brian Watson of CIO Magazine (see Web 2.0: Too Good to Be True?). “It’s the money-saving argument that’s getting pushback lately.”

Web 2.0 does not deliver the ROI, does not live up the hype, and is not even close to being a top priority for senior management (not all, but most).

A CIO Magazines study, Top Technology Priorities for 2008 finds that even techies don’t consider Web 2.0 as a priority. A survey of 250 “top IT executives” from a collection of small, medium and large organizations doesn’t even touch on the issue of Web 2.0.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 fails the grade, according to executives" on Content Matters.

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Have you put a blog or a wiki on your intranet yet? You're not alone.

If you read they hype you know that Web 2.0 / Intranet 2.0 is incredibly cheap and quick to implement; not to mention, everyone wants it…

Communicators and IT managers alike are not sold, if not confounded by Intranet 2.0. Jane McConnell’s Global Intranet Trends Report reveals that very few organizations have implemented or optimized Intranet 2.0 tools for general use in most organizations:

Read my full article: Intranet 2.0 on the rise, but barely.

Some of the upcomign conerences and seminars dedicated to intranets:

10th Annual Intranets for Corporate Communications (Federated Press)

February 11, 2008     Toronto, ON

Contact Federated Press to register

IntraTeam Event 2008 (IntraTeam)

March 5 – 6, 2008     Copenhagen, Denmark

Register Online