An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The bartender turns round and says, “Is this some kind of joke?”

I’m sorry: terrible gag. I don’t know any good jokes. However, love it or hate it, would you put it on your company website?

One of the hardest things to get right with online content is tone. A lot of content – both on intranets and the internet – is written in a formal ‘company’ voice, thick with information and respectability. More light-hearted styles of writing are often shunned for coming across as inappropriate.

Read on…

It’s an almost universal requirement for corporate intranets to post organisational charts, but it can be pretty time consuming to maintain, especially if there are regular staff changes.

A common approach is to create the chart in PowerPoint and upload it as a downloadable document. Of course, this means that you have to spend a fair amount of time drawing the charts initially and then more when you need to download the file and make changes (especially if you need to add another level to the hierarchy). As a result, the charts often become outdated and unreliable. Read on…

A common problem with intranet content is that it is often out of date or, just as importantly, it is perceived as being out of date by users. Keeping all that content up to date can be a challenge, especially if the intranet is low down on the list of responsibilities for content owners.

A good way to keep your intranet current and relevant is to focus on key information and brevity. Intranet dashboards are supportive of this approach as they display only top level information, usually in a graphical format that makes it quicker for both the audience to digest and the content owners to share.

Read on…

One thing we notice when we’re looking at large intranets is the sheer number of ‘external’ attachments that they often have. Rather than displaying content on HTML pages, many intranets make users download PDFs and Word DOCs.

These documents have their place online. They’re great for larger articles or graphic-heavy content. They’re also good for templates and policies – essentially, things that a user might want to print and read, or that don’t need to be changed. They’re also good when an intranet relies on users to upload content, as templates can be provided. Read on…

SharePoint has been the buzzword lately around the water cooler in our office. More and more of our clients are deploying it as their intranet system of choice. This popularity is reflected in its sales: Microsoft expects SharePoint sales to hit $1 billion this year, and more than 100 million licenses have been sold since the product was launched in 2001. Read on…

The 5 worst things you can do to your intranet

Some companies see their intranets much as they do potted plants: mainly decorative, placed with the intention of cheering up the workplace. Like plants, intranets appear easy to maintain at first glance – but this is not the case. Intranets are fickle and easy to kill: too little attention and the site will wither and die; too much water – or information – and it will drown in a puddle of inaccessibility. Read on…

Most people are aware of the buzz surrounding things like weblogs, “citizen journalism”, and even podcasting. They’re often used as examples of how the web is allowing greater participation from its users. But is there a place for any of this participation on a serious business intranet? Read on…