[thelist] Teaching Staff to Fish and Email Icons

[Bonnie McCoy]

Rudy, Ron, John, Martin, and all who took time to offer comments, suggestions and opinions,
Your input has been, as always, most helpful and thought provoking.

>anyhow, your FL is to be congratulated and assisted in every way possible -- 
>so don't get into a disagreement, just try to make it work...

>Sounds like you're using a sledgehammer (browser
>technology) to crack a nut (GUI shells).

>This is an office IT issue, not a web one.

 I do agree, but FL's hope was that he could use the intranet as a faster, cheaper alternative. 

>try to arrange it so that discovering things on the intranet is fun, so 
>that people will want to explore

 One of the points that I'll make to him is that the most frequently accessed pages on our site are the cafeteria menus - they seemed to have been motivated enough to figure this out. Our deployment of the online manuals should work fine with enough energy put into supporting and teaching along with good explanations of the benefits and ease of use. (The Cluetrain ideals are somewhat reflected in our site, but with a minimal budget and so few people involved in development, the ubiquitous problems of keeping content fresh and interesting is a constant battle  - nothing new about that.)

>made sure that the NT build we put out with Intranet access had an Orbit icon, not an IE one.

 We have "Public Access Workstations" with the Intranet, cutely named of course, as the default screen. I really like the idea of changing the icon, and appreciate the suggestion. 

 It is  wonderful to work for someone who has "vision"  - much more fun than a corporate suit who doesn't spend any time thinking up new stuff. FL is doing great things for his organization by championing (and paying for) the intranet, and it is being used as a model for other organizations that we are associated with. The challenge for me is to work through some of these ideas and either make them happen or explain clearly why there are better alternatives. My attempts to research this particular idea led me to the same conclusions that you folks mentioned, but as a final effort, I wanted to throw it out to the most talented group that I knew, figuring that if I missed something, someone here would find it. Now when I present my alternatives to FL, I will be confident that I'm not missing something obvious. (It would have been a 'good thing' (tm) if it had been feasible)

Thank you all again.
  - b