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Features
Intranets have evolved. Cumbersome and expensive technology has been replaced by software that allows almost anyone to build an intranet quickly and more cost efficiently than ever before. The challenge of making an intranet successful is no longer its technology platform, but rather maintaining the relevancy of information and inspiring employees to use it.
Imagine you’re a high school senior wanting to pursue a medical career, but you live in a rural community in north-central British Columbia. Your school doesn’t have the human or financial resources to offer the preparatory classes you need to get into college, and the nearest school teaching them is hundreds of miles away. The 6,000-plus students of Nechako Lakes School District No. 91 (SD91, www.sd91.bc.ca/sd91)—a roughly 27,000-square-mile area encompassing 21 schools and eight communities with populations ranging from several hundred to several thousand residents—know challenges like these all too well.
Columns
When considering implementing a content management system (CMS) for an intranet, working with content publishers in your organization can be almost as difficult as the IT project itself. Whatever the pre-existing method for publishing content, a new CMS is likely to be somewhat more complex, requiring publishers to do some additional work like denote properties such as subject, keywords, and expiry date, or even hierarchical subject, location, and audience. If your publishers haven’t been adding these elements before, then there may be some resistance to adding them now. You need to have persuading strategies in place during training.
An intranet audit in a large, international organization is a complex affair. It is easy to produce misleading numbers, create accidental bias, and ignore cultural differences—at the intranet’s peril.
Read_Me_File
Reviewed this issue: Improving Intranet Search; Intranet Design Annual 2006: Ten Best Intranets of the Year; Wine.com
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