We've learned from our work with SharePoint for various medical devices clients that creating "pretty" functionality means thinking quite a long way past "Out of the box" and applying some "outside of the box" approaches. Content Formula have developed several good looking and interactive applications using a combination of Flash, JQuery and HTML/CSS. None of these required any SharePoint development, instead using standard SharePoint features and some creativity from our developers! Because of this, they cost our clients a lot less to develop than if we'd used the in-house development team.

This is just a little taste of the sort of things you can create with some good SharePoint knowledge, lateral thinking and just a dash of wizardry. Read on...

Most intranets are largely static sites. On its own, an intranet is essentially a shared drive, serving up centrally stored documents alongside internal articles or communications. Some organisations use words such as “communication hubs” to describe them, but for the most part that communication is one-way.

These days, however, an intranet really can be a hub for your company. The intranet portal now closely mirrors employees’ expectations of world wide web functionality. Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint allow users to communicate with each other and collaborate, much as they would using social media tools such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

There are a number of capabilities that you can implement relatively easily, with SharePoint in particular making many of them available as standard.

Read on…

SharePoint 2010 is in beta testing, with a probable release date somewhere in Q4 this year. In the new release of the collaboration platform, emphasis seems to be placed on breaking out the roles of people involved in the production of a SharePoint intranet, and the access to resources as needed by people in those roles.

SharePoint 2010 looks to be the biggest update in the Microsoft Office family this year, as all communications so far indicate that other Office applications will only undergo minor tweaks.

So what are the big changes for SharePoint?

Read on…

Nothing kills the authority of an intranet site – or any website – faster than obvious, avoidable errors. These errors can be factual (such as job titles or general facts), graphical (the wrong image assigned to the wrong person, for example) or grammatical (bad spelling or punctuation), but whatever the mistakes the effect is the same: users go elsewhere.

It’s not enough to make sure that your site owner is thorough. Everyone makes mistakes, and the best way to cope with the possibility of a slip-up is to ensure that you have a dedicated quality control process in place at all times. If you use an agency to run your site, then they should be able to work this out with you. If you work on the site yourself, read on for some key areas that you should focus on…

Read on…

Maintaining an intranet can be a tricky business, but why not kick off 2010 with some New Year resolutions that will make your intranet fly? Read on for our top 5 tips for the year…

Read on…

What’s the best way to design your intranet site? Who should you centre your intranet around: the site owners, or the site users? Take a look at our presentation that highlights the advantages – and disadvantages – of both approaches, and that offers advice on how to build your site to be usable for everyone.

Using search analysis to improve your site.

Running user surveys and interviews are good ways of finding out what your users want, but they might not give you the whole picture. People can’t always say exactly what it is that would make a site and its content more usable. Furthermore, what a user wants and what a user needs might not be the same thing!

Analysing search patterns and results on your site is a great way of studying user behaviour which can give you different insights into how your site and its content could be improved to better meet their needs, as well as how you can optimise the internal search on your site.

It’s nothing to sniff at: users are becoming very comfortable and very proficient at using search engines, both on the web (using search engines such as Google) and internally (using your site’s search function). So the better your search works, well, the better.

Read on…

Firstly I must point out that I am in no way advocating horizontal scrolling on web pages.

Assuming that you are using a screen resolution of at least 1024×768 pixels (96% of internet users worldwide in 2009), you will almost never see horizontal scrolling. This is because it has been recognised as highly unusable for some time. I won’t be debating that here.

However, I take issue with the fact that vertical scrolling seems to have been tarred with the same brush.

It’s extremely common for a client to request that users should not have to scroll to see any content on their pages (or a large majority of the content at least). This seems to be based on two assumptions. First is that users don’t see content below the page fold (the point at which the content disappears behind the frame at the bottom of the web browser). Second is that users don’t like scrolling and find it a chore.

Read on…

Information architecture is a key phase in all of our projects at Content Formula. Whether website or intranet, we know that if you get the structure, organisation and classification of content right at the start of the project, the end result will be a seamless, usable site.

It always starts with defining both the business and user requirements. It’s important that you define both, because the way the business wants to organise their content is not necessarily going to be how users will search for it. There are numerous ways to gather this information (that’s a whole other blog post!), including interviews, surveys and focus groups. This stage is also often combined with an audit of any current site or content.

Read on…

On one of our intranets, we developed custom functionality to enable employees to rate feature articles. The client stipulated that ratings should appear itemised beside the article with each employee’s name.

However, there was the possibility that this would discourage members of the organisation from providing feedback, given news of soaring unemployment all over the world due to cutbacks.

The fear that all employees’ engagement is visible across the internal network potentially leads an employee to ask themselves “will my manager scrutinise my level of participation in my next appraisal?”

Read on…