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Features
The effort to keep resources up to date, particularly in a personalized environment, is pretty intense and frequently just doesn’t happen. So, spending some extra time at the beginning of your portal deployment to consider re-use of content and applications should be a priority. If you identify the opportunities for re-use up front you’re going to save a lot of time and effort.
HarperCollins’ intranet consists of 70 dynamic and 10 static Web sites, which can be accessed by employees from their seven U.S. locations and Toronto, Canada. The dynamic sites are used for vacation scheduling, sending jobs to the copy center, providing sales information, accessing corporate services, and email. Static sites include the HarperCollins home page, “HarperSource,” where employees access publishing industry-specific information including external content provided by the Corporate Librarian Group, and “HR Online,” which offers information on a wide variety of human resources-related initiatives. Most of the sites draw from an SQL server data warehouse based on ASP, although the company has begun a migration to Cold Fusion.
Columns
Given the trend of companies downsizing (what a charming euphemism for laying-off employees), corporate survivors have a lot more than survivor guilt to deal with. Despite limited resources, department heads face an ever-increasing demand for intellectual capital. Enter the intranet, which was supposed to be an inward-facing microcosm of what the Internet has accomplished for communication worldwide: an exponential increase in information availability and the facilitation of communication. Yet, like so many attempts at translating the organic information explosion of the Internet into managed business processes, it’s taking more than a few tries to get it right.
Intranets provide a great platform to share information—in portals, team sites, personal sites, and more. They offer a way to transport information too—through Web services, learning objects, and Web parts. More and more end-users demand, or imagine, that information should be available in their workflow at the point of learning or decision-making. It isn't just a question of finding information anymore, although that isn't a done deal yet. It isn't even about having it "pushed" to you. Right now, users literally wonder: Can I have all the information I need within my work application—be it authoring a document, checking a sales account, collaborating in a community, or participating in an online conference? The answer to the above question is yes. Achieving content integration, on the other hand, is not easy.
Question: Since we re-launched our intranet a few months ago, the number of hits each month has gradually decreased, and I am under pressure from my manager to re-justify the investment in the new content management system. Do you have any tips on how to increase the use of the intranet?
Answer: Before I suggest some ways of increasing use, maybe the problem is not as bad as it may seem; page hits alone do not tell the full story...
Read_Me_File
Reviewed this issue: Information First, Step Two Designs, and Boxes and Arrows
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