Notes from day 2 IntraTeam Event Copenhagen 2015 #iec15

I'm attending the 2015-edition of the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen. It the 10th time it has been organized and it's my first time at the event. I'm writing along with the talks that I attended and will share my rough notes with you below. These are the notes from day 2 (- Day 1 was the workshop day. As I had to give a workshop I don't have any notes on Day 1. The slides for my/our workshop can be found here).

James Robertson, How design thinking is transforming

Intranets could do more with design. There are several tools to design intranets like:

• Cardsorting
• Tree testing (for instance by using Treejack)
• Wireframing
• Usability testing

James stresses that we should designing intranets that engage. Intranet should not only be useful (as he thought in the past), but also be beautiful. Employees look at it every day. It should delight employees. He shows several examples of intranets that do this:

• Accolade
• Calgary Board of Education (based on Sharepoint)
• vxconnect, Virgin America's intranet

Also design should change the way of working. Coles – mycoles and Lakewood High School are shown as examples.

Theresa Regli, Evaluating mobile platforms for the enterprise
The main question Theresa will be addressing in her talk is: Should you go big or small when it comes to mobile technology? Big is go with Google, Microsoft, etc. But there are quite some best-of-breed smaller vendors.

What does enterprise mobile technology do?

• it helps you with mobile app and mobile web experience development
• services required by these mobile applications

Key players in the market are:

• Infrastructure: e.g. IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, SAP
• Mobility specialists: e.g. Verivo, Appmobi, Xamarin
• Niche offerings: e.g. Corana labs, July systems, Spring

The smaller vendors/specialist are much more focused on details and distributing to all types of mobile devices. The big guys focus on android and ios and that’s it.

What exactly are you trying to do?

• simpler b2c (consumer apps)
• b2e applications
• location based
• online and offline
• mobile websites (make websites responsive, one-on-one conversion)
• etc.

Theresa doesn’t think there’s a case for a complete native app for the intranet.
Hybrid apps: downloadable applications but the core uses standard web technologies.
Make sure you have a strategy and choose between a native app or responsive intranet and something in-between.

Closing thoughts
Select big infrastructure if:

• already invested in them
• need capabilities to mobilize other products with the suite
• enterprise concerns more important than breadth of functionality
• mostly suitable for b2e scenarios
• usability focused on hybrid approach

In other situations go for a niche vendor.

Dana Leeson, Complicated business management systems made easy

Works for BSI, British Standards Institution (global company)

How do we support our employees?

Shows an (ugly) screenshot of BSi’s assurance business management system just before 2014. They knew they had to do something.

Four separate systems had to be integrated into one (experience), that would manage 3000+ documents:

1. assurance
2. product certification
3. medical devices
4. standards & publishing

They structured the documents into 4 content types and x document types and x document categories. And assigned an owner. They developed a form with 20 fields to upload and share a document.

BSi wanted to make the system purely focused on work, not on things like news that don’t have to do with news for auditors.

The entry point to the new systems gave a simple overview of updates and comments and links to useful pages.

The users like the system because it’s easy, gives a good overview of work and the documents can be found.

This system is used by auditors and is audited by auditors.

They thought this project would be done in 6 months, it took them 2 years. Know your internal limitations. External examples of speed don’t always work in your organization.

Perttu Tolvanen, Intranet systems beyond SharePoint – overview of the best alternative

You need to understand the philosophy behind systems you can use as an intranet platform.

Make sure you draw out how the (intranet) system relates to other systems. It can help you select the right intranet platform.

Perttu sees 2 trends:

1. Social layer for the enterprise. Many of the older intranet system providers haven’t found the answer to the social layer.
2. Microsoft and the cloud. SharePoint 2013 is a dying platform. All investment is in Office365.

And he distinguished between different types of intranets for which different platforms are right:

1. Social publishing, e.g. Episerver, Confluence, Umbraco, Jive
2. Complex social publishing (SharePoint doesn’t support this), e.g. Episerver, Drupal, Umbraco. These platforms also support mobile strategies as well.
3. Management portal concept (hard to move to the cloud), e.g. Liferay, exo, ibm, SharePoint, Oracle
4. Social publishing and teamwork, e.g. SharePoing, Confluence, Jive, Dropbox
5. Social publishing and teamwork and document management, e.g. Dropbox, Alfresco, Liferay, IBM

Tomorrow we'll continue with notes from day 2 of the event.

Others are live-blogging the event, please refer to Sam Marshall and Wedge Black's blog.