Doug Cornelius .com

Chris McGrath of Thought Farmer presented a great session on the new wave of intranets.

1. Blow up your old intranet. It probably has become a document dumping group. (I  think of it as a roach motel. Documents go in, but they never come out.)

2. Turn Users into Authors. Turn readers into writers. Let people edit documents. Put a big “EDIT” button on each page. Seek information and knowledge. Graymont, a mining company, pushes intranet editing out to everyone, including blue collar workers. The truck drivers have access to and can edit the intranet.

3. Expose the Social Context of the Content. You need to see who created the information, who edited and who commented. Then also what other information they have created and who they report to. (More important as the size of the company grows.) A particular point of information source is the employee directory. There you can aggregate the reporting structure, background and other information creation.

4. Make Things Findable. If they can’t find stuff then the intranet is a failure (An intranet is all about supplying information to the enterprise.) Provide multiple ways to find. Search by words, browse, tags. Chris also mentioned a “work-stream”: a time based view of changes to the intranet. This is a bit more serendipitous. Show recent changes.

5. Add Signals. When something changes, you should signal those who are interested in it. An email notice or an RSS feed accomplish this goal. The key result of signal is that it turns the intranet into a communications platform.

6. Provide Scaffolding. When you do a physical building project, you put up scaffolding then pull it off when the building is father along. It is easier to edit than to create. It is easier to copy than to create. Do not present people with a blank page. Set an initial structure for the intranet like the top level. For example: people, offices, projects. Chris recommended a card-sorting execrise as a way to determine the initial structure. Chris recommended getting an information architect. He also suggested OptimalSort.com as a tool for card-sorting.

7. Hold a Barnraising. A way to create an initial block of good content. Migrate exisitng content or create new content. Get a bunch a people into a room. Set up a page for each employee in the company.

8. Make Them Use It Once. Most people are intimidated by learning something new. peopel need to try it once to see how easy it is to use. Get people in a room with a short training exercise. A great first step is having everyone add some information to their employee page. Then have them comment on a page and have them create a page.

9. Lead By Example. The more senior people ou get involved the more likely the intranet will be successful. CEO comments and pages tend to be the most popular. The CEO’s blog will be the most read blog.

10. Get the Intranet “in the flow.”  Most intranets store the artifact of information instead of the acting as the agent to create the information. You can also hijack the flow. Grab an email and have it published onto the intranet (respecting security of course).

Bob Buckman’s ultimate idea-sharing system:

• one transfer step
• all employees have access
• all employees can contribute
• available anywhere
• available at anytime
• indexes every word
• users contribute in their native language

Bob proposed this in the 1980′s (before the internet and intranets).

For a large company, the intranet should be rolled out in smaller groups. If the company is 200 or smaller, then roll it our across the entire organization. You take lessons from smaller groups and apply them up to the larger organization.

Chris thinks the “Turning Users into Authors” is the most important. Most companies do not succeed in “getting the intranet in the flow.” Can your company operate without the intranet? Would anyone notice if the intranet went down?

There is a repeat of this webinar on Thursday December 11 at 1pm PST: Intranet 2.0 in 10 Not-So-Easy-Steps. 

After a wonderful four weeks of paternity leave, I am back in the office working on our knowledge management projects.

As a welcome back present, the development team upgraded our intranet from SharePoint 2003 to Micrososoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. Unfortunately, they are still working on a few permission and editing issues which is keeping us from starting our Enterprise 2.0 projects. (I feel like a dog with a bone on the end of my nose, just waiting for the boss to say go so I can snatch it and eat it up.)

The delay is giving me some time to prioritize my projects. I think first up will be “wiki-fying” my multi-state conveyance database. This was one of my first knowledge management projects on the first generation of our intranet. There is a certain poetry to it being the first Enterprise 2.0 project.

The multi-state conveyance database is our collection of real estate practices, procedures, forms, transfer tax, mortgage tax, precedents and previous matters for each state. Obviously some states have lots of information and some have very little information (Sorry Wyoming!). Its not really a database. Its a collection of webpages hosting the content. They have been notoriously difficult to edit and keep up to date. Equally hard has been letting interested people know about new and updated information. By converting this to a wiki, it should be easier for the entire group to add to and edit the content. It will also be easier to see the changes, verify information and alert the real estate group to new information.

Expect to hear more about our journey into Enterprise 2.0.

Eric Charran published his whitepaper on: Managing social networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The whitepaper points out a few ways that SharePoint can be used to expose more information about a person inside the firm. It does not provide the level of interaction or a flow information as powerful as Facebook.

SharePoint does provide a nice platform for exposing more information about the person by pulling information from multiple systems. In particular, I think the use of the techniques and tools discussed in the whitepaper can be used to exposed internal expertise.

Although tagging and the folksonomy the tags create have interested me, I have a hard time figuring out how they would work inside a law firm.

Sure it would be great to allow users to add tags to pages on our intranet or other web-based applications. It would also be valuable to compile tags for external websites that would be useful to the practice.

But the vast majority of our knowledge artifacts are documents in our Interwoven Worksite document management system. Interwoven does not have a way to tag. If I can’t tag my documents, then I might as well not have enterprise tags at all.

Sure, you can add comments and profile fields to the document in Interwoven. But that is not the same thing. Since you can only have one profile, you can only have one tag set per document. You also do not get the attribution. If I do not know who made the tag, I am less likely to rely on it. The tag has much more value when you know who made it.

Collecting and displaying tags by person then turns the tags into a person’s expertise and areas of interest. If you look at my Del.icio.us tags you can see what I found interesting. My tags are in the lower right corner of the website.

One of the interesting tools that Vivisimo has apparently packaged with the new release of its Velocity search tool is the ability to tag documents in Worksite. Actually, it should give you the ability to tag any knowledge artifact in any system you connect to the Vivisimo enterprise search tool.

The tagging in Vivisimo gives you ability to enhance the findability of the knowledge artifacts inside the law firm and find out more about the people inside the law firm.

Way back in June, I sat through (and enjoyed) a presentation by David Weinberger at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As a result I put his book, Everything is Miscellaneous on my reading list. Having just finished reading the book, I was pleased to stumble across a video of his presentation.

It is great presentation and book to provoke thought about how you organize your knowledge. If you have a free hour, watch the whole video. If you only have a few minutes, watch the first few minutes.

Louise Ferguson put together a piece on the Intranet Benchmarking Forum: A-Z Indexes on Intranets.

We have an A-Z on the current version of our intranet. It serves three purposes:

1. It serves as a placeholder for content not on the intranet, but just a person to call on the topic.
2. It helps with the short-comings in the intranet search. This is in part because information is not on the intranet or a repository indexed by the intranet.
3. It helps with the short-comings in the navigation on the intranet. It is difficult to browse deep into the intranet structure.

We are in the process of redesigning our intranet and upgrading its platform from Sharepoint 2003 to Sharepoint 2007. One of my goals in our redesign and upgrade is not remove the need for an A-Z index. I think we will end up keeping it in place because people have gotten used to it.

To remove the need for the A-Z index, we will need to make sure that the content ends up in the Sharepoint platform or a repository that is indexed by Sharepoint. We need to make sure that the item gets returned in the search results and is displayed in a way that is meaningful to the searcher. We also need to improve the navigation so people can more easily browse to the most important and most used content.

If we succeed then we would not need the A-Z index. People have gotten used to the A-Z index, so we cannot take away the feature.

Jakob Nielsen in his Alertbox thinks Web 2.0 can be dangerous, but thinks Web 2.0 features are great for an intranet:

“Community features are particularly useful on intranets, and many of the Intranet Design Annual winners offer them. The reasons communities work better on intranets also explains why they’re often less useful on the open Internet:

• A company’s employees are an actual community with a crucial shared interest: succeeding in business.
• Employees are pre-vetted: they’ve been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to. [Nielsen's quote not mine.]
• Although some intranet communities — such as those around internal classified ads — are aimed at lightening up the workplace, most intranet communities are tightly focused on company projects. Discussions stay on topic rather than wandering all over the map.
• Intranet users are accountable for their postings and care about their reputation among colleagues and bosses. As a result, postings aim to be productive instead of destructive or flaming.
• Small groups of people who know each other are less susceptible to social loafing, so more users contribute to intranet community features. In contrast, Internet communities suffer from participation inequality, where most users never contribute and the most active 1% of people dominate the discussions.”

Dr. Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, publishes his Alertbox bi-weekly on web usability.

I think he is overly harsh on the value of user-generated content on the web. Most user-generated content I run into is very high quality.

Of course I wholeheartedly agree with his take on the benefit of the Web2.0 applications inside an enterprise and inside a law firm. Web 2.0 inside the firm, Enterprise 2.0, will change the way knowledge is captured inside the firm. They are providing a new and better way to communicate.

An intranet is one of the foundation tools for a knowledge management program. We are currently working on the redesign of our SharePoint intranet. This will be our third generation intranet using SharePoint. The redesign team has spent a great deal of time discussing navigation on the intranet.

I have come to the realization that most users want to be able to navigate and browse to their desired content on the intranet. This seems contrary to the internet where most people are comfortable searching for content. I think there are two reasons. First, intranet searches (ours included) have been notoriously bad, by not searching enough repositories and not presenting the search results in a coherent way. Second, users treat the intranet like any other application where they click action buttons to get the information they need.

Users should be using the intranet to help answer a question. So a well designed intranet should be setup to help the user answer their question. This means organizing content content solely around business units (for a law firm practice areas or administrative departments) is not the most useful way to organize the intranet.

We decided to have some organization on the intranet organized around typical tasks. We worked with focus groups and card-sorting exercises to layout a top level and secondary navigation. There was a lack of agreement on where some items should be in the navigational scheme. It seems everyone had different way of thinking about how content should be grouped.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. He makes a compelling case that an item need not be in a single location when dealing with digital content. The book also shed a lot of light on why people have different ways of wanting to group the intranet content.

Along this same idea, Bob Mixon posted on MOSS 2007 Site Navigation – Topical Versus Organizational and Getting More from the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). He indicates that you can get the best of both worlds in SharePoint, organizing content by business group and by topic. This technique seems like it will be able to give the business groups the ability to manage and update their information, but repackage it and make it available to different user groups in different ways.

Bill Ives wrote on the The FASTForward Blog about how Serena has Adopted Facebook as Their Intranet. They established a private group in Facebook for the company’s employees. They built a few Facebook applications to interact with a simple content management system behind their firewall.

One of the reasons I use and experiment with Facebook is to see how a tool like it could work inside the enterprise. On our intranet, like on most intranets, the photobook/employee directory is the most widely visited site. I think it would be great to have more robust personal and professional information in the system.

If Facebook offered an enterprise edition, I would buy it. Of course the enterprise would have to force some content onto each profile: extensions, title, etc. But lots of features could carry over and be successful inside the enterprise. Then, think about the application integration into other systems inside the enterprise. For instance, you could publish a list of matters the person is working on.

Groups of people with similar interests could form spontaneously and have a platform to form, communicate and share information. I would encourage the formation of groups for both personal and professional purposes. It would be great for attorneys interested in Malaysian investments to form a group. It would be equally great for staff and attorneys interested in knitting to form a group and share information.

I think this ability form online communities would lead to better job satisfaction and better employee retention. Susan Hanley posted an article on NetworkWorld.com: Can online collaboration help with employee retention?

“I was approached by a community member who came up to me to share that she was still at the company for one and only one reason: because of the connections she’d made with people she would otherwise never have met in the community of practice of which she was a member. Some of her connections were made at face to face events, but far more were made in the online community forum. She worked in a regional office and had a competency in a unique skill area that made her feel a bit isolated among her local colleagues. As a result, she began a job search to find an environment in which she would feel less isolated and more connected. When she became involved in the community of practice, she found a group of like-minded people with similar skills who could help discuss and resolve thorny problems and share emerging ideas, and at one point, get her assigned to a project that turned out to be a turning point in her career development.”

Of course we want employees to work towards the mission of the enterprise. But we also need them to connect with their co-workers, whether the co-worker is next door or on the other side of the country.

I have generally frowned on the weather display on intranet pages. But I saw this and found it interesting. This SharePoint webpart from Bamboo Solutions could display the weather for all or our offices in one place, side by side.

Comparing the weather is much more interesting, than just seeing your weather information. In LA it is always going to be sunny and 80 degrees. But that becomes much more interesting when it is displayed next to the weather in Boston (especially on a murky day)

Thanks to the SharePoint Product Group for publicizing this on the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog.