infoarch

So I recently met a new colleague who had worked at Merck & Co. and shared his experience with using a expert finding and knowledge sharing platform. He reached out to me to find out if we have a comparable platform, so he could use that to meet his needs. I was curious which platform he had experienced. But he wasn't sure. So I googled a bit during our call - of course I told him I was googling, I don't want to be rude and divide my attention between him and the web... - and there is was. A clear blogpost from 2009 about Merck's experiences with an internal knowledge sharing platform. It also described the underlying technology. What's so special about this? Several things: The power of (Google) search. It still continues to amaze me how easily you can type in a few words in a search engine and find what you're looking for. In this case what I was looking for popped up in the first three results. The power of blogging. I found what I was looking for...

I recently posted my notes on the 1st masterclass of the SharePoint conference we organize. The 2nd masterclass of the SharePoint conference is by Andrew Wright . His talk is about ‘contextual intranet’. I'm sharing my summary of the masterclass below. I think I'll also post one or two more posts on the conference itself. But first Andrew Wright's masterclass about 'contextual intranets'. What is a contextual intranet? Wright’s definition is: An intranet that facilitates the development of content – both qualified (signal) and unqualified (noise) – that supports continuous improvement, efficient operations and employee engagement and delivers this content in a meaningful context to the employee. Characteristics of the contextual intranet The contextual intranet exists of the following elements: Content development Business imperatives (continuous improvement, operations (tasks), employee engagement) Content delivery (context provided by meta dat...

Intranets have been around a long time, but not necessarily well loved. SharePoint brings huge opportunities for intranets. But new technology does not make problems go away. So, how do we deliver SharePoint intranets that are really great? This is the question that James Robertson will answer in the 1st masterclass at the SharePoint conference 2013 . Great intranets in words We start out with the question: what words describe great intranets? The audience says: connected, collaborative, accessible, social, information value, support daily work routines, usable, fast, mobile, task-based, updated, interactive, single-point of trust, attractive, innovative, easy to maintain and affordable. Purposes James goes into five purposes of intranet: content, communication, collaboration, culture and activity. James shows many examples of intranets that fulfill these purposes. Content We need to deliver usable and valuable information. We quite ‘good’ at this and we have way too ...

Part 2 of my notes from the workshop about User Adoption strategies for Sharepoint by Michael Sampson . (Part 1 can be found here .) We're at stage 3: Enlivening Applicability. Ways to do this: Over the shoulder watching: show how people use the tool in practice and learn from them Group re-imagining: help a group see beyond current work practices Embedded champions: one participant mentioned she connected to secretaries to speed up and encourage technology adoption. ( I agree! ) Sandbox for experimentation: don't go live right away, but start small, let people play with the technology and use the technology for the roll out itself. Easy first steps: closing down the options, focus on some affordances of the technology not all. Built it and they will come: set up the tech and see if users will adopt it by themselves Next phase (4): Making it real. How do you make it real? Provide zero other options. E.g. take away all other platforms but one. Experience from th...

My notes from the pre- conference workshop with Michael Sampson about User Adoption strategies for Sharepoint. (This workshop is part of the Intranet Conference .) Technology is easy compared to getting people to use the technology. Most people aren't first wave users. They don't say: Give the new tech to me. They ask: "Why should I use it? What is the reason for the new technology? My work has to be improved by the new technology." They basically tolerate the tools. If something is easier it's better for them than that it is perfect. Most organizations assume adoption will be 100%. So, there's a problem. The objective is not user adoption. It's the overal effectiveness of the organization for instance. Or, improve work. The overal approach to user adoption is very important. (Refer to the Collaboration Roadmap .) Research shows that people are least satisfied when IT rolls out and the most dissatisfied.... Sharepoint is a platform. This means ...

Martin White recently sent me a review copy of his new book ‘The Intranet Management Handbook ’. I reviewed it in Dutch here (Frankwatching link will be inserted soon). I’m posting slightly different review here on my blog. One with a bit more questions about the book. What is the book about? Not many books have been written about intranet. And the existing books usually address an aspect of intranet. For this reason the publication of ‘The Intranet Management Handbook’ is special.  I’d like to congratulate the author of the book, Martin White, with this event! I really enjoyed reading the book. It is well-written and complete. (For those that don’t know Martin: he’s one of the older internationally known intranet experts.) As I said I enjoyed reading the book. It addresses all or most of the intranet topics. It doesn’t go into too much detail, but enough detail for it to be a real handbook. It helps intranet managers and employees in their daily work. Whether you’ve been in ...

I just wanted to make some noise for one of the largest Intranet conferences in the world. I've been there twice (to give a breakout session) and can say this conference is one of the best I've ever attended. The location is great, the people are super, the content is inspiring, the food is good, etc. This year I'm one of the organizers of the conference and I hope we can live up to the expectations... ;-) Are you coming to the Intranet Conference (Dutch: Congres Intranet )? I hope you are. You can find the program here in English or Dutch . I think we have really nice list of keynote speakers. Dion Hinchcliffe, Jane McConnell, Martin White and Tony Byrne. Big thinkers and inspiring speakers in the intranet space. As the program shows, we're taking a bit broader approach to intranet than the previous years. So we'll focus on the traditional intranet, but also on social intranet, social media, enterprise 2.0 and social business. Peter Hinssen will lead us throug...

Next speaker: Stein-Ivar Aarsaether, ABB Global Web Management. ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies. 117000 employees. ABB has a long history (founded in 1883 after lots of mergers). ABB’s intranet is a traditional CMS-intranet, based on Lotus Notes. In 2002 they were one of the top-ten intranets of the year (Nielsen). Problems they have: Hard to find information and services you’re looking for Difficult to keep content updated Lack of collaboration tools They organized an ABB Intranet Conference in 2007. In 2009 they decided to go with Sharepoint 2010. In 2010 they launched the 1 st version. Every couple of months they launch a new version. ABB uses Google Search. A new section in their intranet (based on SP 2010) allows employees to follow feeds of other employees (like Twitter). But it could be more interactive, like Facebook. For instance if you comment on someone’s feed he/she doesn’t see that… Commenting on activity stream in SP is not out-of-the-box...

Mikaela Terhil of Wartisila Corporation is on the stage. They provide lifecycle power solutions. Wartsila recently allowed employees to access social networking platforms like Facebook from inside the company. They started by integrating the intranets into one intranet. Then they added social features to the intranet, workspaces and office communicator. Why social features? They wanted to help employees do their work, find the right employees, connect people together, bring expertise and different perspectives together, share knowledge, etc. In short: knowledge sharing and productivity. So they now have: People search > search over all profile information. Employees fill in profile info, blogposts etc are automatically related, you can also follow others Compass profile > this is personal blogs, which is planned but not implemented yet Personal site > collects and shows all your personal information on the intranet (not MySite, but MS profiles) Poll > to get a feel of what ...

Next up is Viviane Dupre of Bombardier. Bnet evolution will be done in a more formal and structured approach. It’s more than intranet; an enterprise 2.0 implementation. They have high level management buyin for the project. A heavily organized governance model. Current version of the Bnet employee portal is from 2004 with less than $100.000 investment. It replaced 100 plus intranets. They have 350 content managers. Minimal governance at the content level. Bnet has been identified as a business critical application. In May 2009 they did a survey. 5000 employees responded to the survey. 64% gave a negative rating of the home page. They also asked what employees actively used on the internet. Like Youtube, LinkedIn. 42% were contributors in 2009. This project was also used to improve employee engagement. By empowering employees, be recognized. Increased employee engagement should lead to increased customer engagement. They wrote up a mission for the Bnet. Stressed enabling and increasing...

Breakout session by Toby Ward (and blog ). Gives a general overview of Sharepoint old and new versions. "Sharepoint does a lot of things, but does very few things very well." (CMSWatch) Search is ok, not perfect. Content management is basic, simple, but some need heavier stuff. Some clients have site sprawl. Although not many in the room seem to have this problem. Good integration with Microsoft tools, although sometimes work is needed. Sharepoint can be extensive. The above-mentioned remarks relate mostly to Sharepoint 2007. Not many using Sharepoint to power to the corporate intranet. More on department and workgroup level. Now over to Sharepoint 2010. Release date is May 12. (A guy in the room won the Canada cap for getting that right.) Toby says: don't migrate right away. Wait for the first service pack to be released. Parts of Sharepoint 2010: sites composites (mashups) insights search content communities Biggest improvements...

Just wanted to point you to the following post. Recently two colleagues of mine were interviewed about their work in rolling out Sharepoint in the company I work for . It's a nice story and their approach is thoughtful. I'm curious if your Sharepoint implementation is different. If it is could you explain in which way or point to your post describing it? Tags van Technorati: sharepoint , collaboration

In my role as an information architect I move between several very different worlds. For one I try to connect business and IT together by speaking their language and translating. Secondly I also move between the more formal systems and informal tooling. Formal systems, strictly related to defined and described business and information processes, seen as harnesses by knowledge workers, but essential to manage product and resource information. On the other hand you have all the 'good stuff' for knowledge workers: email, wiki's, blogs, social networking, bookmarking, etc. They usually love this part! What I find very strange is the fact that you pay millions for the more formal systems, define big projects to implement them and knowledge workers still find them 'hard to use', 'not encouraging creativity and innovation', etc. On the other hand social media are usually free or very cheap, easy to use, etc. What going on here? And isn't there something funda...

For some time know I've been looking around for a blog platform with which you can post internal and external posts. (I wrote about it here and here .) I'd like to be able to write a post and decide to post it internally and/or externally from one platform. (There's a caveat though, when you have an external blog post, which you would like to extend for internal use.) Well, it looks like this has become possible with the new version of SocialText (3.0). I haven't tried it yet, but Robert Scoble's interview with Ross Mayfield (with demo of '3.0') seems to point in that direction. Am I correct? What I also really liked about the new SocialText was the online/offline feature! Great thinking and essential stuff for the mobile workforce. It also integrates with Sharepoint, SalesForce, etc. For me, SocialText is a true inspiration for current (usually cloggy) corporate Intranet's and maybe the foundation of the intranet of the future. Tags van Te...

There's been lots of buzz on Sharepoint and the use of Sharepoint as an intranet. Slowly the pros and cons of Sharepoint are being published. A much-stated remarks is that MOSS should not be used for large enterprises. Not much detail is given by those who say that. Maybe they could give us some more insight in this topic? In my experience many large companies are implementing MOSS and doing that pretty successfully. Furthermore good architecture and governance is stressed. As well as addressing records management. W.r.t. RM I found it very insightful that the RM team blogged on RM in Sharepoint for some time to address question and discuss with customers what they needed. A recent Gartner report showed however that Sharepoint only supports some of the compliance standards. Thanks Intranet Blog and tfpl blog for the insightful posts.

Some time ago I wrote about wikipatterns and said that it would be nice to have Sharepoint patterns too . ChiefTech recently posted on a new book about Wikipatterns . In his post he basically questioned: Aren't wikipatterns more broadly applicable, e.g. to collaboration in general? I would agree. The patterns that are mentioned can applied to collaboration in general, and collaboration tools, such as Sharepoint, Intranet platforms, etc. Working on collaboration patterns would lead to greater and easier adoption of collaboration tooling. Usually such a tool is given to a (group of) users and they have to sort things out themselves. Having patterns would help an IT or IM department give the user/team a fitting solution (configuration) for his/her problem.

Well Google Sites was just launched and there's all kinds of debate on whether it will compare to Microsoft Sharepoint. Here are two interesting ZDNet post by Mary Jo Foley and David Greenfield . And a (long) post by Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb . Her posts also addresses what to think of Google trying to circumvent the corporate IT department. W.r.t. Sarah's post: I understand what she's saying and I share many of her thoughts. I would like to add what I wrote before: what does Google Apps and Sites imply for corporate Information Management ? What I do find, though, is that her post is written in a very defensive way, as if she is an IT department employee (as I am myself...). I miss a more opportunity-driven approach to your post. Of course Google sites isn't going to compete directly with Sharepoint, for now. But where could this take us anyway?

Some time ago I posted on a new initiative called wikipatterns . Not too long ago SocialMediaToday posted about a survey on wiki adoption in companies . This post also pointed to another website with wiki adoption patterns. In my post I also mentioned that it would be nice to have e.g. Sharepoint patterns too. I haven't really found anything yet that really looks like a platform for sharing 'Sharepoint patterns'. What comes closest is this website, called "Community Kit for Sharepoint" . But there's not much activity there. Maybe we should just start a Sharepoint patterns site ourselves. Who'd like join and investigate if we can set this up?

Does anyone know of good articles and/or sites that compare IBM Workplace / Quickr with Microsoft Sharepoint ? I'm looking for articles and/or sites that evaluate these tools w.r.t. user-friendliness, scalability, manageability, functionality, etc. If you know one or more, please post them in the comment section!