We thought you’d like to know where we go for intranet inspiration when we’re in need of some ideas of our own; we could write essays on the subject, but then that would be missing the point of this exercise, wouldn’t it?

The easiest way to do this is to provide you with some links that you can follow, which will take you to some innovative, investigative, or simply downright interesting intranet resources – so here are the first five for you. We’ll post again soon with other favourites – there are many great people out there in the intranet community, and the selection below is just the beginning.

All of these will open in their own tab or window, so don’t worry about losing your page if you click on them:

http://www.intranetfocus.com/blog – The blog section of the Intranet Focus website, penned by Martin White who we’ve mentioned before as a truly knowledgeable resource for intranet advice at all levels.

http://intranetizen.com/ - Intranetizen is a great blog by two guys with, as they themselves say, ‘almost 20 years of blue-chip intranet experience for some of the world’s most respected brands’ – which says everything about the high quality of the content available there.

http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/ – A long-time favourite of ours, Step Two Designs has been a ‘go-to’ resource for us for a long time now, and their advice is always a good read for anyone with a passion for intranets.

http://netjmc.com/- The well-respected blog by Jane McConnell, which features a lot of genuinely empirical study and investigation into the intranet world, including the annual, invaluable Digital Workplace Trends survey and report.

If you think there’s anyone we’re missing, just leave a comment below and let us know – as mentioned, this is just the first in a series of posts so check back soon for more. In the meantime,  if you’d like to find out why we’re so interested in intranets then why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

It’s time for the final part of our 3-part interview series on the past, present and future of intranet design. You can find parts 1 and 2 of our interview here and here; this part deals with our anonymous designer’s views on where intranet design goes from here, and what the future might hold.

By now you know what you”re here for, so let’s get on with it:

Intranet Ideas: So, as you mentioned we’re seeing some interesting shifts in the way people use computers, the internet and by extension intranets too – how, in your opinion, will this shape the future of intranet design?

The Designer: For me, I think it’s important that people realise that the future of wider web usage and technology is inextricably tied to, and perhaps necessarily even the template for, the future of intranet design. As we’ve seen with the advent of social media in the intranet environment and the increase in online mobile access, what happens to the internet happens to the intranet – so that’s what i’m going to focus on as the answer here.

First of all, devices will become more diverse, if that’s not too much of a tongue twister! PCs aren’t going to disappear overnight, nor even for a long while yet if indeed they ever do, but alternatives such as tablets will become more mainstream within business – for example, we already see floor staff using them in the retail sector retail as a logical progression from previous point-of-sale devices.

This diversification will take the focus away from PCs as the hub of business computing, but make no mistake – they will still be a necessary and vital part of office computing environments for the foreseeable future. More and more, though, mobile access will become a big part of the way we access our software, because nowadays people don’t necessarily need to be sat at a desk to do their work, and just as importantly management attitudes are changing sufficiently to recognise this fact.

This change will have a knock-on effect on Line of Business (LoB) applications in terms of their strategic development, because developers will either have to produce functionality that works just as well on each type of device, the alternative being to create different versions of the same software to access the same information. You know, when you thik about it there’s genuine potential for the different demands placed on software development by traditional PCs versus those placed on it by tablet and mobile device interfaces to become this decade’s version of the IE6 vs web standards battle.

Apart from that, which I suppose we’ve dealt with to some extent earlier [in previous posts], HTML5 and CSS3 look like they will be big influences on the future of online design and the systems we use to access software. CSS3, on its part, can reduce the amount of imagery used in delivering web content, bringing down the load on browsers – reinforcing the thin client model that you hear people talk about.

An example of this, which is so simple and elementary but which actually makes a genuine difference to web – and intranet – designers, is when you want to create rounded corners in a design. Previously, these would have to be images, meaning more load on the browser and just a more fiddly design, whereas now CSS3 allows you to use its border radius functionality to create the exact rounded corners that you need via the code itself, without the hassle of images.

Then you also have HTML5. HTML5 has a whole world of possible uses – check out http://slides.html5rocks.com/ – that really open up the exciting potential of the web. One example of this is the use of video tags, which reduces the need for Flash video because the fucntionality is taken care of by the browser itself, rather than Flash, that is essentially a plug-in. There’s a good argument to say that this will make the browsing experience more stable, and there would be fewer issues with Flash, for example when it slows people’s browsers down.

Online video is a huge part of the web’s future, and intranet people can see this too as video content increasingly becomes part of, and in some areas replaces, traditional documentation for things such as training or internal comms advert strategies. A huge factor that will dictate the way that online videos develop is the video codec standard, which has become a battleground for the big tech/browser companies.Again, it’s totally tied to the browsers!

Mozilla and Opera are stronngly advocating Ogg Vorbis as the preferred candidate for the delivery of online video, but Apple are plowing a different furrow on this and want to use the h264 codec. The winner of this battle would, to a significant extent, dictate the future development of online video.

To get another cook involved in making this video codec broth, to horribly mangle that old idiom, Google has come in and backed what is actually a high-quality codec in WebM, which is similar to h264 but which is also Open Source like Ogg Vorbis, so you would think that this would be a perfect fit for both sides in this debate, but as far as i know it’s far from anywhere near being resolved to any satisfactory degree. The way that this debate eventually works out will really strongly shape the future of video content on the web, and by extension the future of video content on intranets. Obviously, the side that wins this war gets to a large extent to dictate how video works on the web, and eventually this will seep through to business computing, to LoB apps and to intranets.

Anyway, that’s just a taster of what’s to come, a glimpse into one of many potential futures, but I think I’ve dealt with the most obvious issues at this point in time. I suppose that, from this interview, the message I would want people to take away from this is that they need to take notice of trends in the wider tech world, because many of these will become established internet computing functionality, which will then become business computing functionality, which will then also become intranet functionality.

However, and even more so in the business world than elsewhere, you have to be careful about being an ‘early adopter’. If you get in there too ealry and throw your lot in with one specific technology or product, then you can end up being tied to it for an eternity or, even worse, investing in something that is quietly shoved aside in the race for the next big thing.

Ultimately, the aim is to strike a balance between getting your hands on the best functionality available, and getting your hands on something that is durable, long-term and built to last: you could sum it up as a matter of creativity vs continuity. That means that there needs to be agreement on certain practices and principles before a technology becomes truly viable from a business perspective – and ideally, that should also include a clearly-defined way forward and, if necessary, an exit strategy so that things don’t get bogged down in total dependence on one technology.

It’s a bit wooly, a bit idealist, and a bit ‘warm and fuzzy’, but my hope is that we can go on from here, having learnt the lessons of the past. We should be working towards a future where everyone has a say and there’s room for competing technologies to ultimately work together, each in their own way, towards a situation where it’s all about making the online experience better for everyone. Hopefully, that would mean that we’d never have a situation where one element is holding back the wider world of intranet design.

We hope that you enjoyed the Interview with an Intranet Designer series, and we would be delighted to hear your comments; please do leave them below if you’d like to say anything about this article, or why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

Part 1 of our intranet design interview series dealt with intranet design’s past, and the influencing factors that have led us to where we are today. As you would expect, this second installment deals with the current intranet design landscape, and what users want to see on the intranets of today, with part 3 due soon to deal with the future.

Without any further ado, here’s the lowdown on the present:

Intranet Ideas: So, now that you’re seeing the light at the end of the IE6 tunnel, what does the current intranet design landscape look like? What are you seeing in terms of demand for today’s functionality?

The Designer: Well, we’re not out of that tunnel just yet, but now even Microsoft, to its credit, is actively trying to stop companies using that particular browser iteration – they have the IE6 Countdown site, and in 2014 support officially stops for good. If you have a quick look at that site, you can see that the current usage statistics are interesting – there’s still a lot of usage in China, an emerging market in our field and a growing power that could potentially influence things, but in all other territories usage is now much less prevalent: though it still tops 10% in middle east and asia, it now accounts for under 5% of all browser usage in Europe Africa and Americas. I’d bet good money that 99% of all those users still on IE6 are business users, too.

Now, in 2011, we have a multitude of available browsers: in addition to the latest IE offerings there’s Safari, Chrome, Firefox etc., and development is now usually focused on cross-browser functionality. It’s not as PC and IE-focused as before. Device market share has always been a big driver in creating this situation, with Apple’s mobile devices as well as an increase in Mac usage in corporate environments that generally have Safari and/or iOS tied in, and of course other mobile devices are also far less dependent on IE too. Lots of businesses, not just personal users, have diverse user bases now in this respect, and they need this to be catered for in their intranet installations. That wasn’t really the case even 5 or 6 years ago, apart from maybe in dedicated arts/design firms – there has been a definite shift in attitudes within the business environment.

For me, the cause of this shift is all about people changing from traditional usage models, and a big part of this at the moment is the trend for accessing corporate apps on mobile and tablet devices such as the iPad. That influences what people feel comfortable using online, and what they expect to see in other online environments. People of all ages these days are now far more comfortable within online spaces in general via a wide range of devices, and they expect the functionality and ease of use that they experience in their personal web usage to be replicated to a great extent in business environments: they judge against those benchmarks, so the devices with the most market share will influence the way that online business environments develop, in much the same way that IE did when people took their first PC-based steps online. That has significant implications for the world of intranets, and doubly so now that we have seen the advent of Social Media for business.

I suppose you’ve also got to look at performance and security as influences here – the more market share a browser has, the more likely people are to write code to target it. Security is without doubt one of the most important concerns for LoB apps, so the more secure a browser is the more you can state its case for use withing business environments. And make no mistake, browser security is taken very, very seriously: recently, IE, Firefox & Chrome all underwent a hacker test at pwn2own [a hacking competition that is held every year at the CanSecWest security conference] to find out which was the most resilient of the currently available browser choices on the market. To cut a long story short, the hackers did their worst (or best) to get through the security measures for each browser; the winner this time actually turned out to be Google’s Chrome, so it will be interesting to see what future years bring on that front.

Of course, all of the above just goes to prove that everyone would ideally be using the latest and best browsers available. Everybody realises that – perhaps especially those users tied to older systems – but you also have to be realistic and accept that as intranet designers the reality is that we’re still at a point where there is a definite mix out there.

At one end of the spectrum, we have companies who need to stick to older browsers because they can’t adapt their systems, and you can see the difficulty implementing change on a professional level too – not many people would have the guts to go to the CTO and let him know that in next month’s budget meeting he has to tell the board that a large part of their IT infrastructure is swifty becoming outdated. And at the other end, you then have businesses that are not tied in to legacy apps or software at all, that are free to choose whatever functionality they want and that are actively looking for the latest advances in web technology to be instantly available on their own intranets – it can be a bit of a balancing act to keep everyone happy.

Increasingly, though, those who do stick with older browsers will see more and more of a difference between the functionality that their systems can offer and the functionality that is offered online in more or less every other capacity. You run the risk of going back to the old days, where business computing functionality was pretty much alien to the average office worker, and this would bring back the chore of training users to use clunky, largely unfamiliar and unengaging systems. That actually erodes the benefits that the systems in question initially brought to the business – the financial investment that you’re ostensibly protecting by not moving to a modern browser actually becomes less and less valuable as the system falls behind without the new functionality that a new browser would bring. At some point, I suppose you have to just draw a line in the sand – the tough decision will have to be taken to migrate to newer technologies or you’ll get left too far behind. People know this, too, so the only question is exactly when the leap will happen; much as I’d like to say otherwise, it may not be uncommon to see companies using IE6 beyond the 2014 support cutoff point.

As I say, in the middle of all of the clamour for new functionality you still have to be realistic: the barriers to the upgrade process are precisely those that constrain the vast majority of businesses across their operational scope – namely, time and money. In some cases, the more time and money that people have put into their old systems the more of those resources it will take to move them out, but I think that in many other cases it could just be a simple case of a swift audit, then migrating or archiving the useful content and just starting more or less afresh. And just imagine how much more enjoyable it would be suddenly to have today’s web technology at your fingertips for your daily job, rather than continuing with that of a decade or so ago. But whatever your circumstances, there’s a certain amount of change management to be undertaken if you want to reach that goal.

As for how this affects intranet design, these days we’re making more creative designs that incorporate more of the latest functionality – we had the race for ‘Web 2.0′ apps, and since then the focus has been trained on the incorporation and management of social media within the business workplace, so we’re just trying to figure out how to make things work across both old and new environments. And a lot of this work to incorporate more media-rich functionality within older systems is largely image-based by nature, due to the technological constraints in place, which unfortunately increases the load on the browser – it’s a vicious circle in some ways. CSS does help with these issues, but even then some of the things that we try aren’t supported by older browsers, so unfortunately the functionality available in those browsers can suffer because of that.

However, it’s not all a question of browsers – you can’t discount the role that your organisation’s corporate policies and procedures have in dictating what’s available on your intranet. For example, video content has become massively popular on intranets in general recently, and this has been provided mostly via Flash up to now; YouTube has of course been the big driver here, embedding videos has become second nature to web users, and its ubiquity and ease of use has been replicated in many LoB environments to great success – users nowadays expect it in their business environments too. But this is where company security policies can dictate available functionality: up to now, it has largely been the case that if users aren’t allowed to install Flash then video on the intranet is not an option. So, if you’re operating in an environment with strict rules on what’s allowed within the firewall then you have to manage expectations to match this fact.

As I mentioned, social media has become wildly popular too, and if people can see it elsewhere online then they wonder whether they can have it on their intranet, with the aim of incorporating familiar functionality to create an environment that is truly engaging and that people are genuinely comfortable using. Adoption is easy if you’ve used something before. But while some companies are receptive to the idea of this sort of functionality, others really do not see the benefit. It’s a question of culture – some companies want their brand to be corporate, others want to be casual.

Brand guidelines and the marketing department can also play a hugely influential role here: your company’s personality – ‘who you are’ – dictates what you do, and that applies online as much as anywhere else. Currently, I would say that there is certainly more of a general trend towards ‘casual’ intranets, and I would say that this is maybe a result of social media’s omnipresence in the online world – companies increasingly want to replicate that engaging, personal feel. Perhaps there’s also a shift in the wider business world – organisations, certainly from a promotional perspective if nothing else, are becoming less about starched collars and more about connecting with your clients on a one-to-one level.

The traditional divides are being blurred online – market leaders in the wider world of personal and social web technology, who traditionally inhabit environments entirely separate from the inner workings of the average business, are increasingly dictating the shape of internal online business operations. Personal computing is becoming business computing, and vice versa – the distinction is less clear.

If we can hark back to the past again, you might even say that the paperless, online, 24-7 available ‘anywhere office’ that was widely predicted 10, 15, 20 years ago is finally close to becoming a reality in terms that are genuinely meaningful to the average employee, rather than just techie types. Back in the early 1990s only a tiny percentage of the general population owned any sort of mobile device, and even regular PC use in business environments was far less widespread and prolific then than it is now – and that’s without mentioning the widespread lack of web access. Now, in 2011, people can conduct their business in a variety of ways that would have been more or less unimaginable twenty or thirty years ago – using smart devices to log on to web-based systems and communicate from anywhere at any time with anyone across the globe – even now we’re only just starting to see the potential of the internet to revolutionise the way we work.

Check back for Part 3 – The Future, the final part in our three-part interview series. Please leave your comments below – we’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

It has been a little while since the last post on Intranet Ideas, so we thought we’d go for some interesting and original content to mark our return.

To this end, we’re going to talk about intranet design: this area seems to be at quite an interesting crossroads at the moment, as shifts in non-business computing and usage models are increasingly having a direct effect on what we find online, so we thought we’d sit down with someone who has a direct role in both web and intranet design, and years of experience to back it up, to find out their thoughts on where intranet design is now, where it has come from and where it’s going. There’s a lot of content in terms of the word count we came out with, so we have split it up into three parts: past, present and future, each of which we’ll publish as a separate piece.

All contributors of course remain anonymous…

Part 1: The Past

Intranet Ideas: Thanks for giving us a few minutes of your time to pick your brains on the subject of intranet design. It seems like quite an exciting time at the moment for someone in your field of expertise; the way we use the wider web, and the devices on which we do so, seem to be having an increasingly significant impact on the way we operate online in the world of intranets and other business applications. Ultimately, we want to talk more about where we’re going with intranet design, but I suppose that if we’re going to get the bigger picture then we need to talk about we’re we’ve come from too – what, in your opinion, has been the biggest past influence on intranet design?

The Designer: Well, it’s not a popular answer, but taking into account the majority of past business usage it’s probably a true one: IE6. Around the turn of the millennium, following the ‘dot-com boom’ of the late ’90s, you saw a lot of action in terms of companies investing in IT systems to a huge extent; the potential of the web for corporate comms was at the time both proven to some extent and also still a genuinely exciting future prospect. Also not too long after the turn of the millennium IE6 was released, and its subsequent dominance in terms of browser market share was huge – we’re talking 80%-90% by some estimates, and for the next good few years.

Don’t forget that IE6 was not just hugely dominant in the business sphere, but it ruled internet access in general too. So, at this point, pretty much any company investing in online IT systems was effectively tied in to IE6, because there wasn’t too much else out there that would get buy-in from a business perspective. Browser share was largely insignificant from a business perspective for non-IE browsers, between Netscape’s decline and the arrival of other competitors onto the scene. It was – almost literally – no competition, and so IE6 more or less dictated what you could do online.

Now, back then it wasn’t so much of a restriction – the browser was new, there was a lot of exciting stuff that you could achieve. However, as we all know, the resulting amount of development and investment in compliant Line of Business (LoB) applications has created a situation that even today has not been totally resolved – a lot of money has been invested in systems that were built specifically to work with IE6, and which therefore don’t play well with other browsers at all. This means that, to this day, there are lots of companies which have systems in place that are critical to the correct running of their operations that are also, to a large extent, IE6-only – they are still limited by the constraints placed upon them by a browser iteration that is now almost a decade old. Ten years is a long time to anyone, but, in web development terms, technology that was released ten years ago is almost prehistoric.

The knock-on effects still exist: in the HTML and CSS for the systems in question, you’d have to do things specifically to work with IE6. The problem is that the way it worked wasn’t what we now know as ‘standards-compliant‘, so when other, more standards-compliant browsers came out later on, they really showed up the gap between the browser market; as the development community went on increasingly to favour standards compliance in their browsers, a real gap started to open up.

And a lot of time has been spent since then in trying to bridge or make up that gap – on the part of coders, on the part of designers and on the part of Microsoft – but because IE6 went five years without a successor in IE7, its limitations became truly bedded-in within many businesses, all of whose systems were more or less built specifically to suit IE6. LoB apps are probably the main reason IE6 is still as prevalent as it is today; it takes a lot of time and money to upgrade your systems if you’re a large company, and if you’re a smaller one you might not have the money to do so at all.

Intranets, my main design focus, are of course to a large extent part of the LoB infrastructure, so the hangover has affected their development as much as that of any other system; we’re at a point now where we’re able to focus future development squarely on future technologies, with Microsoft’s predicted cut-off point for IE6 support announced for 2014, but even so we still have to bear in mind that we can’t count it out completely until everyone makes the jump to a more recent browser.

Check back for Part 2: The Present, the second in our three-part interview series; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

We’re making a couple of assumptions in this post.

Firstly, if you’re reading our blog then we assume that you’re doing so because you have an interest in intranets, intranet management or a related area. If we’re right in that assumption, then it’s a good thing that you clicked on this particular post, because we’ve got some extremely useful information for you.

And secondly, if you are the sort of person who has an interest in intranets, intranet management or a related area, then we assume that you’ll already be more than familiar with the work of Martin White. Martin is one of the most respected names in intranet consultancy, both as Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd., and as an information scientist with over 30 years experience in information management, publishing and consulting roles.You can find him at @IntranetFocus on Twitter.

In the course of his work, Martin consults on the design and management of intranets and extranets, and the specification, selection and implementation of content management software and search software. Over the last ten years he has undertaken around 100 projects in the UK, Europe, the USA and the Middle East. Since 2002 he has been a Visiting Professor at the iSchool at the University of Sheffield.

Such a wealth of knowledge and experience would, of course, be absolutely invaluable to anyone at any stage of their intranet management career, whether you’re starting out and could do with a guiding hand, you’re an experienced professional who would be interested to compare management methods and techniques, or you’re somewhere in between the two.

It’s a good thing, then, that  Martin has written The Intranet Management Handbook; due for release in the second week of February 2011, the book is a true A-Z for intranet managers, providing advice and guidance on everything from intranet requirements gathering, business case development and content strategy, through selecting the right software and technology, all the way to project management, implementation, strategy and governance.

A huge amount of what every intranet manager should know – from recent trends such as social media for intranets, to the more fundamental tenets of project management – is covered in Martin’s book, so we would recommend that you either pre-order now, or check back in February 2011 to get your copy hot off the presses, as the saying goes.

In the meantime, if you can’t wait to find out more, we interviewed Martin recently about his book, as well as discussing more general intranet management issues; you can find out what he had to say by downloading the interview here – just click on the “Click here to download” button and the interview PDF will open in your browser (a final assumption being that you already have Adobe Reader or similar software).

Do let us know what you think of the interview in the comments below; you can also find more intranet information at www.orchidsoft.com.

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2011 on Intranet Ideas. The arrival of a new year is often the spur for everyone to start looking forward, making breaks with the past and starting afresh; people are looking for the next new, exciting thing to come along and keeping an eye out for the latest trends. Well, this blog post aims to do exactly that, but it is also based on a conversation we had last November – so hopefully we’re not just jumping on the latest bandwagon, but you can be the judge of that.

As regular readers will be aware, our last post was based on Twitter coverage of the Employee Portal Evolution Masters event a couple of months back in Berlin, and we mentioned that we couldn’t cover all of the related chatter in one post. Well, we won’t be able to cover it all in two posts either, but in this second and final of our proposed pair of #epem posts we’re going to address the emergence of intranet personalisation – something that members of the intranet community have cited as the next big trend in intranet usage.

While we were monitoring the #epem chat, one of the tweets that stood out among the many came from @DigitalJonathan, a very valuable member of the intranet community on Twitter, and someone heavily involved in the digital side of things for one of the world’s most well-known companies. You should keep an eye on his tweets to keep up with the latest intranet trends and developments, and you can also read his blog at imjon.com; the intranet-specific content is at imjon.com/category/intranet-2, and it’s well worth a look – thoughtful and informative, with lots of links through to other supporting content.

Anyway, the tweet in question was the following: “Maybe intranet home pages should be like iPad desktops… #epem add your apps”. This brings up some interesting ideas for the future of the intranet as a user experience: as devices such as the iPad take personal computing and internet usage away from traditional desktops, users increasingly define their own experiences by downloading the ‘apps’ they want to use rather than having software suites already installed on a PC. So, perhaps it is worth considering whether or not intranet technology will follow the personalisation trend.

One influence on any such trend would be management attitudes: intranet usage methods are usually defined by organisational culture, and it remains to be seen whether organisations with a more authoritarian approach would allow less formal intranet usage. We tweeted back @DigitalJonathan “re: adding apps to homepages – at a business or an end-user level?” to gauge the expectations of someone who works with intranets in a large company on a regular basis.

We received the reply “Both please” – genuine openness to the possibility of personalisation. We asked whether this was already a common feature, with iPhones etc. making the concept of apps familiar to users. Over multiple tweets, we got a very interesting response.

“v uncommon just now, but personalisation is a 2011 intranet trend. Think that most emp still not interested” was the first reply – so personalisation is confirmed as something that is definitely on the map for the new year in the minds of intranet managers, yet something that some key stakeholders do not currently see as a benefit. This was backed up with “example: only 35% of [company at #epem's] employees customise, and most of them customise in the same way – conclude that it’s an emerging trend yet established. Believe iPad iPhone android w7 mobile will drive idea”.

These tweets provide some substantial food for thought, falling into several key areas. First, availability: the fact that customisation is available on the intranet of the company in question  – an international financial services group – illustrates that even large companies are considering the option of personalisation at this early stage, which is an important indicator of approval for a concept that can put a great degree of independence in the hands of each intranet user.

Second, buy-in: looking at the figures involved, over one-third of the company’s users customise their intranet experience – a significant proportion for a trend thought to be in its infancy. However, if the remaining 65% of employees at the company in question do not customise their intranet, then what is stopping them from doing so? Are they unaware that customisation is available, are they unwilling to customise, or are they unconvinced of the need for customisation at all?

Third, behaviour: if most of the 35% of users who customise their intranet experience do so in the same way, is that because there are certain elements that are applicable to most users within the organisation – a kind of internal customisation best practice? And are these elements ‘pushed’ to every intranet user, or chosen independently by each person? The extent to which management allows the end user to customise their own intranet experience would be a vital factor in any personalisation process – too little, and it’s not really personalisation, too much and it could impact upon the effectiveness of collaboration on the intranet.

With regard to the last of the above tweets, in the light of the information under discussion we were totally in agreement with @DigitalJonathan’s assertion that intranet personalisation is on the way to becoming established, yet certainly more of an emerging trend that will be heavily influenced both by mobile/tablet devices and by the usage models that accompany them. Our response – again spread over multiple tweets in case you’re wondering about  the character count – was that “mobile device adoption is the big driver, away from traditional PCs. What users do away from work online eventually becomes what they do at work online, e.g. social media. Corporate comms slightly more restrictive but as attitudes change so will usage. Becoming common in the next year or two perhaps?”

Maybe our enthusiasm for the advent of intranet personalisation has led us to be a little overoptimistic, because @DigitalJonathan responded with a slightly longer timescale: “I think 2-3 years will see this become common currency”. To sum up, it seems that personalisation is certainly somewhere on the map for intranet inclusion; early adopters are getting on board already, even within large companies, before the whole thing looks to become standard practice at some point from 2012 onwards. That’s our theory, of course: maybe we’ll be proved right, maybe not, but it certainly looks like something that we wouldn’t rule out at this stage. After all, they said social media would never work on intranets…

If you have any opinions on the subject, we’d be delighted to hear from you in the comments section below; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

We couldn’t cover anywhere near all of the #epem chat in one post, but that’s not what we’ve decided to do with this blog post; rather, it was one tweet amongst the many that caught our eye and got us thinking.

@lukemepham, who we’ve mentioned before as a particularly perceptive intranet tweeter (check out his blog at http://www.intranetjob.co.uk/), was watching a presentation given by one of the organisations involved which was aimed at addressing social media as a way to encourage community; during this presentation, it seems that the company in question explained how they employed social media on their intranet in a really rewarding way for everyone involved, and that their users may have enjoyed the initiatives as the company itself benefitted from them.

However, it seems that the resulting KPIs taken from the initiative in question missed out one important element. As @lukemepham says: “Oh shame, none of the kpi’s were about fun. Nobody measured how happy it made people. Missed opportunity?”

It’s a very valid point. Of course, the organisation in question seems to have set out to measure a defined set of data from its social media initiative, conducting that initiative to great success, and getting the positive KPI data they wanted – job done, within the terms set at the beginning of the exercise.  But outside of that data range, there could have been a whole host of other information and statistics (or metrics for US English readers) that may be somewhat less immediately tangible, but could be of equal importance to the success of a social media initiative, and of an intranet as whole.

Those stats/metrics would be about happiness; about fun; about how much users enjoyed the social media initiative, and how much they enjoy using the intranet as a whole, both in conjunction with and in comparison to the initiative in question. You might say that happiness is a difficult thing to measure (relative or absolute? subjective or objective?) but getting data on happiness is something that various people and organisations would like to do, not least the UK Government with its plan for a ‘Happiness Index’. You can debate what such measurements would tell you, and how you would go about taking them (good article on this subject from the BBC here), but there are ways you can measure happiness.In fact, intranet people do it all the time to gauge user satisfaction.

You could use your intranet’s polling tool, if you have one, for one-click surveys, you could use more complex forms with workflow (again, if you have them), you could make intranet satisfaction part of people’s annual reviews, or you could always use the good old-fashioned method of just talking to your users about it. You have to make sure that people actually like using your intranet, that they actually want to log on to it without being forced, because intranet usage becomes a chore then you’re going to drive people away.

Of course, discussing how you can make your intranet enjoyable to use and so keep your users happy is of course a big enough subject for a million other blog posts – from content strategy to available functionality, and everything in between – and you can find a few related posts elsewhere on Intranet Ideas, but the main point is really that @lukemepham was absolutely spot on.

Fun and happiness are essential parts of intranet usage and strategy, whether you call them that in so many words or make it a more formal debate about usage statistics – they’re two sides of the same coin, to use a cliché. If you make your intranet exciting to use, you won’t have a problem getting your users on there and using your functionality, and your KPIs will come out looking great. Even if you don’t rate happiness as a traditional KPI, it underpins all of the other KPIs you can possibly measure. Make sure that you don’t forget about it.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

So what can you do to stop this happening? Well, one obvious fix is to look at changing the way you create your intranet homepages. Don’t think that you have to have the same homepage as everyone else – consistency is good, and standards are set for a reason, but if you always follow the herd then it becomes hard to stand out.

Keep to the things that make homepages work – give users the information that they want and need, adnd make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for – but try to think more creatively about how you might present a more attractive page to your end users.

For instance, you could try something like this:

It’s a bit different from the average intranet homepage, no? And all of the content above is dynamic, updated from a regular intranet back-end, just like your typical homepage – the difference is that the café-style background images on which the content is displayed are just a little break from the norm. It’s a strong concept, and one that actually developed into a successful homepage for an area of a globally-renowned client’s intranet: why stick to a grey square to display your content when it could be inside a coffee cup?

If your intranet platform can cope with something a bit different, then why not push it a bit? Grab your graphic designer, put your concept together and see what you can make happen; your users will help you in the long run. Creating a more attractive homepage gives good content the platform it needs to shine, and it can really give your usage levels a boost.

Clearly, whether this is appropriate for your intranet depends entirely on your business culture, and this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (terrible pun fully, completely intended), but if you have a a bit flexibility in your overall approach, or an intranet area that might suit a less business-like feel, maybe a social or canteen area, then there’s no reason you can’t give it a go.

We’d love to hear about – or even better, see – some examples of other innovative intranet interfaces, so do let us know if you have any to share. We’ll be posting up another one or two soon so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

Earlier this month, we noticed some tweets from @lukemepham about interesting statistics emerging from an intranet usage review that he had just conducted. Luke is an intranet manager for a globally-renowned finance organisation, and his thoughts can be found at his newly-implemented Intranet Job Blog – we recommend that you keep an eye on this as Luke builds it up, it should prove to be a very interest read for those with an interest in intranets and internal comms.

Luke noted that out of 130 pages viewed each month by the average user of his intranet, on average only 4 of these pages were corporate news items – seemingly a low number of views for corporate news (at just over 3% of total) if you consider that one of the primary purposes of any intranet is to provide an efficient tool for corporate and internal communication.

We got in touch to ask whether that percentage was in line with his predictions, and Luke replied that it was ‘less than expected. But this is a first run of the metrics, and there are many reasons why it could be low.’

This is of course absolutely correct: if you enter into a usage review with pre-conceived ideas about what the numbers will tell you, then it’s quite possible that you’ll be in for a surprise. Intranets are infrastructures for internal and corporate communications, and part of this is indeed the top-down, management-to-end-user model of information distribution,  but information access in a contemporary intranet environment is far more wide-ranging in its scope and purpose.

Since the dawn of the intranet (to coin a very clunky phrase), and even more so as intranets become more socially-focused (see this useful post from Prescient Digital Media as an example), information contribution and access in the workplace is becoming far less formal and structured in format; even adopting intranet usage at all is the first break in the chain of dissemination, replacing the previous emails from a management computer to employee inboxes with an online location for information that is more suited to a modern workforce less constrained by time and location.

We told Luke we’d be interested to see the bigger picture with his intranet statistics, and he promised to keep us posted. Well, Luke delivered with the post ‘How our Intranet is used today‘ on his blog, providing a range of interesting metrics that give a more complete account of how the average employee in his organisation uses their intranet.

It’s instantly noticeable that Luke’s users are starting from the perspective of occasional, though regular, web users – his first metric shows that the average employee opens their browser 40 times a month (just over twice a day), and that 15 of those times will be to use the intranet, with each session lasting around 4:00 minutes. So, though overall time online for Luke’s users’  is limited, showing that online activity may only form a part of the average employee’s wider duties, intranet usage represents a significant proportion of his users’ online sessions – over 37% of the time, users open their browsers with intranet access in mind.

This shows us the intranet’s significance to the online side of its parent organisation’s activities; from this high-level perspective on how far intranet usage forms part of his users’ daily activities, Luke’s post goes on to provide more detailed information on what users focus on when they log on for their intranet sessions.

Of the average user’s ten or eleven searches each month, between 18 and 30% are for people, showing a marked lean towards using the intranet as a social tool; organisation charts and user profiles are natural targets for intranet users, and these statistics show that further development of the social side could be an option for future strategic planning, as this method of interaction sits well with the user base.

This is backed up with the revelation that 9% of views are social forum posts – while some organisations have mixed views on social usage, this actually shows a very healthy attitude towards intranet usage, and is something that could be leveraged through use of ‘sponsored links’ in each thread to content relevant to each forum subject.

It’s not all about social, though – far from it. The intranet shows strong business usage too, with 6% of views for business-related forums, 4.5% on office services and policies, 10% on team-specific sites or tasks and 3.2% on HR services/policies – that’s almost exactly quarter of all activity in indisputably business-oriented content areas.

So, in contrast to our initial impression from Luke’s first tweet, the intranet is indeed an efficient business tool: when you add in the fact that more than 20% of overall views are concentrated on the homepage, plus 3% focusing on global or local news items, and not forgetting the 3% of page views focusing on corporate news that kicked off this analysis, and that’s almost exactly 50% of page views dedicated to business-related content items or areas.

So, overall, we can see that the metrics show a very healthy mix of activity – the strong social aspect obviously goes a long way to maintain user interest when it is the driver behind over 37% of end-user web access, and the social side is interlinked with a strong business element that backs it up. Of course, whether you should even separate the social side from the business side when discussing overall benefit is another matter altogether: we would say that social media is now an inescapable and indeed indispensable part of any intranet, especially with regard to tools such as blogs and wikis, while strong forum usage often provides a source of innovative ideas as well as keeping staff happy and involved. The ‘soft’ benefits of social usage are often hard to quantify, but even at a basic analytical level they constitute a very important factor in maintaining strong overall intranet usage numbers.

This all goes to show that you can’t judge intranet usage on a single statistic alone: although in isolation 3% seemed a low percentage of overall views for corporate news pages, when viewed in the wider context of the intranet’s usage it is evidently a key element of a strong, broad focus on business information and communication.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.