howard@mcq.com USA: 912.596.3713
Resources & Links
Intranet Journal. http://intranetjournal.com/
This site has been well developed over the last year or so, and the news section is very good. There is a discussion list, and this is clearly popular with often a dozen or so contributions a day. A very useful feature of the site is the list of Intranet-related books, though many of these are technical books on software development. The events calendar has a world-wide coverage. Highly recommended!
Global 2008 Intranet Strategies Survey. By Jane McConnell. http://www.netjmc.com/survey/2008signup.html
A great insiders guide to what is happening and what drives intranet strategy and development. From a veteran consultant and intranet strategist.
Intranet Benchmarking Forum. http://www.ibforum.co.uk/
The Intranet Benchmarking Forum is a confidential members-only Intranet and portal benchmarking and best practice "club" for major UK and global organizations. Founded by Paul Miller in 2002, it is the leading Intranet and portal benchmarking group globally and is establishing industry standards for Intranet and portal performance. It has two main tiers, IBF 100 for FTSE 100 and equivalent organizations and IBF Global for Global 500 organizations
Intranets: Enterprise Solutions and Strategies. http://www.intranetstoday.com/
This magazine is an outgrowth of Intranet Professional, co-founded in 1998 and run for the first eighteen months by Intranet consultant, Howard McQueen. The magazine offers case studies, regular columns and a news service. Martin White, the Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd. is a Contributing Editor. Only recent content is available to non-subscribers.
Step Two Designs Pty. http://www.steptwo.com.au/
This site is by far the richest source of Intranet-related material world-wide. Much of the content is written by James Robertson, the Managing Director of Step Two Designs, an Associate of McQueen Consulting. New papers and reports are added on a regular basis and the site also provides access to the Content Two blog which is also written by James.
Intranet Review Toolkit, By StepTwo Designs, Pty. http://www.steptwo.com.au/products/irtoolkit/index.html
The Intranet Review Toolkit provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of corporate intranets. It contains a substantial set of heuristics to conduct a detailed Intranet review that focuses on functionality, design and strategy. Supported by an IA Institute Progress Grant, the heuristics were developed by James Roberton, Step Two Designs, and are based on widely accepted best practices in Intranet and website design, providing a sound quantitative basis for the review.
The Intranet Roadmap, By Step Two Designs, Pty. http://www.steptwo.com.au/ $US120 plus $15 post and packing
There are no current books on intranet development, so this very concise handbook from James Robertson and his colleagues at Step Two Designs is quite important. The 54 page book sets out with great clarity the way in which an intranet should be set up, and will be especially useful to intranet managers in smaller companies. In fact, all intranet managers would do well to have a copy of this booklet.
The main sections of the book deal with strategy, design, content, change and communications and technology. The final section deals with techniques such as card-sorting, design patterns, paper prototyping, process mapping and usability testing. For all the sections there are hyperlinks to additional content on either the Step Two Designs site, or on other web sites. The book comes with a large wall chart that summaries the steps that need to be taken, and would be very useful in project meetings and also pinned to the wall of the intranet team office.
Although this is quite a short book the amount of practical expertise contained within is very high indeed. This is clearly a book written by someone who has considerable personal experience of intranet development, and the writing style is very clear and concise.
Why Intranets Fail (and How to Fix Them, By Luke Trednnick (2004).
A practical guide for information professionals. This is one of the few books published on intranets. Implicit in the title is that intranets do have a tendency to fail, or at least fail to meet the usually unspecified objectives. The author, Luke Treddinick, has been an intranet manager and is now a Senior Lecturer in Digital Information Management at the London Metropolitan University. This book therefore combines a mixture of practical experience and academic thoroughness.
The first section of the book looks at the ways that organizations work and the way that people react with intranets. In the opening chapter the author sets out six categories of intranet user and comments on their implicit and explicit expectations of an intranet. Why organisations behave irrationally in their expectations of intranet success and in Chapter 3 the author sets out to reconcile these competing expectations.
The second section of the book explains how to organise design and manage intranets that are both user-centric and organization-centric. There are step-by-step guides on how to implement an intranet and how to manage an intranet. The final chapter covers the need to anticipate change.
On balance this is a very recommendable book, though in quite a number of areas the author does rather skim over issues without really getting into quite enough detail to be helpful.
Making Search Work: Implementing Web, Intranet and Enterprise Search, By Martin White. http://www.intranetfocus.com/technology/searchbook.php
If you have responsibility for improving your organization's search service, Martin White's book is a must read.
Content Management Handbook, By Martin White. http://www.intranetfocus.com/technology/cmhandbook.php
Step-by-step guidance for developing a content management strategy, Martin White's book is a must read.
Improving Intranet Search, By James Robertson. http://www.steptwo.com.au/products/search/index.html
Search is now being seen as a crucial success factor in intranet implementation, helped by the vigorous marketing of the Google Search Appliance. This excellent report is therefore very timely, and as with all of the author's reports it is full of very practical guidance and the presentation is faultless. The approach taken is to set out two personas, one for a specialist searcher and one for someone with little search expertise, and then compare the value of various elements of a search engine, especially the way that hits are displayed on the screen. This works well, and shows the benefits of personas at the same time.
The report opens with a section on evaluating search engines, and the process of selecting a new search engine. However most of the report is taken up with advice on refining the search interface (12 pages), refining the search results (24 pages) and search engine tuning/usage logs (25 pages). The report concludes with sections on usability testing and the importance of allocating adequate staff resources to search engine optimization. I would also like to have seen more discussion about metadata issues, especially synonym management, and the problems of intranets that contain content in more than one language.
Overall though this is a report that every intranet manager should have in their document collection. It is readable, authoritative, and encapsulates search best practice. It should also be required reading by search engine vendors, most of whose public web sites demonstrate a depressing lack of commitment to search excellence
Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, By Dan Brown.
A very thorough book covering the basics on developing and using design documentation to develop and succeed with web sites. Dan is a practicing information architect and usability expert and regularly contributes to the DCIA community.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (Nov 2006), By Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville.
Although not strictly about content management systems this book is essential reading on the subjects of information architecture, navigation design, search systems, thesauri and metadata. The book is illustrated with many examples of good practice and as with all the other books in this section is written by experts who have substantial practical experience in information architecture. http://www.oreilly.com/
Information Architecture Institute. http://iainstitute.org/
The Information Architecture Institute is the new name for the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, a US-based membership organisation with an extensive international membership. The site provides access to a range of resources that facilitate the development of effective web sites and intranets, and also runs an excellent discussion forum for members. Consider joining this or having someone on your team join this instutite.
ArnoldIT. http://www.arnoldit.com
Steve Arnold is the King of Search. If you have not heard Steve in action then you have missed out on one of the great raconteurs. Steve specialises in search, and knows the technology inside out, but as with the authors of the books in this issue is a great communicator of knowledge, not just information. If you have missed any of Steve's papers and presentations then you can find them at this site. Steve is generous in making his knowledge widely available. The only caveat that I would offer is that especially when looking at the slides that Steve uses for his presentations it can difficult to work out just what he is talking about, as the slides are very much a prop for his spoken comments. And if you ever need to track down a web search engine for a specific country Steve has them all listed, though you need good eyesight to see the link on the left nav bar.
Boxes and Arrows. http://www.boxesandarrows.com/
This unusual web site is not strictly about content management systems but about information architecture and the design of effective web and intranet sites. It is more like an electronic journal as the site is a collection of peer-reviewed papers but the result is that the quality of the content is very high.
CMPros. http://www.cmprofessionals.org/
CMPros was set up in October 2004 with membership open to anyone with an interest in content management. Howard McQueen is a founding member. The driving force behind the organisation has been Bob Doyle, who also runs the CMS Review site. There is an excellent Resources section on the site, and access to this does not require membership of CM Pros.
CMS Watch. http://www.cmswatch.com/
CMS Watch offers subscribers no cost access to current articles on web and enterprise content management solutions and disciplines. The site also offers fee-based reports that are comprehensive and a good value for enterprises desiring to narrow down and selecting enterprise CMS commercial / Open source solutions.
Intranet Blog. http://www.intranetblog.com/
Toby Ward. President, Prescient Digital Media. Toby Ward is a Canadian intranet consultant who has put considerable effort into developing ROI business cases for intranet implementation and investment. Toby blogs about twice a week, and covers a vast range of subjects, including both technical and governance issues. The average length of each blog is quite substantial, and some are more in the way of articles than blogs. What does come across is Tony's personality and the passion that he has about the need to take intranets seriously as a business information platform. As with all good blogs I find myself disagreeing with some of his views, but respecting his approach and gaining much from rethinking my own approach to the issues he raises. Intranetblog is fairly new, dating from April 2005, and is a most welcome addition to the blog community.
Portals and KM. Portals and KM Blog
For a change I thought I would switch from a web site review to a blog review, given that there are now probably more blogs on intranet/CMS/KM/portal related issues than web sites. Choosing one from the vast range of blogs in this category is always going to be very subjective. What I like about Bill Ives's blog is that he does not try to publish something every day, but only when he has something to say. The scope is broad, and I cannot do better than quote the author "This blog shares ideas and hopes to generate discussion on the use of portals, blogs, and knowledge management to provide value to organizations through practical applications. New trends and technologies are covered with a switch to music and food on the weekends." One of the nice things about bloggers is that they always list other blogs, and Bill has an exceptionally well chosen selection on his blog. For a flavour of his style start at 15 February and a seven part series on blogging.
SearchTools.com. http://www.searchtools.com
This site is managed by Avi Rappaport, a leading consultant on search engine selection and implementation. This is the place to come to track down information on just about any search tool for web sites and intranets. There are over 200 search products profiled on the site, which sets out the main features of each product and provides links to references in the published literature. There is also a section on obsolete products which is more useful than might seem at first sight. Search software has quite a long shelf life. The site also contains excellent sections on how to specify a search product and lists reports, books and articles on search-related topics. As I know to my cost once you set out to provide a comprehensive list the effort involved in maintaining it is colossal, especially if you are running a consulting business at the same time. The inevitable result is that some of the information is not as current as it might be, but such is the value of the listings and the selection and implementation advice I still turn to this site on a regular basis, along with http://www.unstruct.org/ an excellent blog on search and retrieval.
The Workplace Blog. http://www.theworkplaceblog.com/
This blog is the work of Shiv Singh, Ray Velez and the Enterprise Solutions Team at Avenue A Razorfish I have long admired this web consultancy for their work on large corporate intranets, and this blog is a frequent stopping-off point for me. The blog covers includes news, trends, commentary and events affecting the enterprise workplace and intranets, extranets, portals, web 2.0 and web applications in particular. Roughly speaking the blog is updated weekly, but at each update there are often contributions from a number of members of the team. The blog is very well presented, with good link selection and even shows the subject tags. The archives go back to April 2005. This is a very good example of what a blog should be and should look like. Highlighting this blog also enable me to alert you to the team's Corporate Intranet Best Practices Update which is a well written (and challenging) synthesis of some of the work that the agency has carried out for their clients. From this they have developed an Intranet Maturity Model wiki. To me the model is a bit too focused on technologies, but it is still a valuable addition to the limited post-2000 literature on intranets, and complements the report referred to above
Useit.com. http://www.useit.com/
Usability has now come centre stage, thanks to a small number of pioneers, among them Jakob Nielsen. The Useit.com site takes an almost perverse pleasure in having no graphics. Aside from the corporate sales element of the site (do seriously consider purchasing the 2005 Intranet Design Annual) the really valuable feature of this site is the Alertbox column, written by Nielsen every two weeks and covering a range of web usability issues. His comments are always provocative, and even if you don't agree with all of them just working out why you don't may lead you to design a better intranet. Recent columns have covered Intranet Portals Get Streamlined, Enterprise Usability and The Canonical Intranet Homepage. Just because Useit.com was there at the beginning in 1995 it is easy to forget that a decade it is still there, and still as useful.
Intranet Consultants (a modest infomercial for these working colleagues)
Howard McQueen USA howard@mcq.com ; www.mcq.com
Martin White, UK martin.white@intranetfocus.com; www.intranetfocus.com
James Robertson, AU jamesr@steptwo.com.au; www.steptwo.com.au
Jane McConnell, FR jane@netjmc.com ; www.netjmc.com
