Intranets often focus on one or two key aspects, depending on who is running the site. The intranet maybe established as a communications channel, or as a repository for corporate content. When tackled in this narrow way, intranets often struggle to be sustainable and successful in the longer term. To be truly effective, intranets need to address three fundamental purposes: content communication activity This briefing will explore each of these purposes, and will outline how all three elements are required if the intranet is to be effective. Content The intranet's role as a repository for corporate information is well understood.

The concept of innovation, and the advantages it can deliver, have come to the forefront in many organisations. With organisations as recognising that market opportunities can be generated through business innovation, it is natural to ask whether the intranets that serve these organisations can themselves be innovative. In many ways, it is vital for intranets to innovate if they are to prosper in the long term. As things currently stand, intranets are often seen as 'dull but useful', which can make it difficult for intranet teams to gain the resources they require. Building more innovative intranets gives the opportunity to

Intranets are often invisible tools within organisations. While staff rely on the intranet to help them complete common tasks, the site itself is taken for granted. The intranet team is similarly low in visibility, with little senior management recognition of the team or its role. The net effect is that intranet teams work hard from month to month, but struggle to gain the support and resources required to deliver a truly great site. While this is perhaps a natural by-product of the role of intranets within organisations, intranet teams can do much to increase their level of recognition (and therefore

I'm doing a lot of work at the moment helping organisations select a content management system. One of the key aspects of this is making sure that our clients get to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of each product, and the vendor demos the major way of achieving this. The first step is to prepare scenarios that outline a "day in the life" of the CMS, and to have these used as a "script" for the vendors. At the end of the session, we then use a very simple scoring scheme for each of the narrative requirements: Score Rating

Search is broken on many websites and intranets. Search results pages are confusing and cluttered, and users can't easily find what they are looking for. It is tempting to think that this is a technology problem. Certainly, if there is a very old or very limited search engine in place, this will need to be replaced with a modern solution. The danger, however, is that it can be believed that simply purchasing and installing a new search engine will solve all these problems. The reality is that search doesn't work 'out-of-the-box', and that there is a small (but vital) piece

When it comes to implementing online forms on an intranet, there is a

Organisations nowadays are complex, diverse and everchanging. Within this working environment intranet managers need to define their place in the organisation. One way to help establish where the intranet manager fits in an organisation is a position description. Position descriptions describe the key or major duties and responsibilities of the position. The intranet manager may inherit a position description with the role or more often intranet managers need to create both the role and a position description. Generally there is a great deal of relevant information on position descriptions available in resources such as books, websites or the human resources

The User is Always Right:A practical guide to creating and using personas for the webSteve Mulder and Ziv Yaar This is a book drawn from the experience of having created many personas for a wide range of different organisations. More than that, the authors have clearly been creating great personas that have had real impact on the websites they support. In a very practical way, the book works through all of the core aspects of personas. How they work, when to use them, the benefits of personas and what they look like in practice. This is all written in a

It would seem to be a statement of the obvious that organisations should do their planning before embarking on the implementation of their new content management system (CMS). Yet all too often this doesn't occur. Let's state this more strongly: the day after the contract is signed with the CMS vendor, the vendor will show up asking: so, what are we actually implementing? If there is not a clear and simple answer to this, the project will go poorly, and the vendor will be more than a little frustrated (which itself may have consequences). This briefing explores the specific details

It goes without saying that an intranet is only successful if staff can easily find the information they need, when they need it. Recognising this, the majority of intranet teams follow a 'user-centred methodology' when they redesign the intranet. This involves making use of core usability and information architecture (IA) techniques, such as card sorting and usability testing. In many cases, intranet teams bring in external consultants or contractors to assist with the redesign project, relying on these individuals to provide the necessary usability and IA skills. While there are many good reasons for doing this, what is often not