[thelist] Resources on building an intranet

Jon Haworth jhaworth at witanjardine.co.uk
Thu Jul 18 09:56:10 CDT 2002


Hi Minh,

> I have been charged with the task of building our intranet, and I'm
> excited about taking that challenge head on. On the other hand, this is
> not a task I want to tackle uninformed or unequipped. Is there anyone
> who has done this already and can recommend resources or offer advice?

I built our intranet here as a spare time project and it's now my full-time
role... it's an old P2-333 I found lying under a desk in the server room,
running a LAMP setup.

It's got static content like:
 - manuals
 - training guides
 - it support stuff ("how do I do a signature in Outlook?")
 - standard operating procedures
 - commission structures for the sales guys
 - staff handbook
 - reference docs like standard terms and conditions

And a bunch of apps:
 - room bookings (we're a recruitment agency, do a lot of interviewing,
   and need to manage who's in which room and when)
 - holiday requests, entitlement tracking
 - sickness tracking
 - company events calendar
 - new employee registration
 - suggestions box
 - booking internal training courses
 - bug trackers for internal software
 - "e-brochure" sendouts (flash presentations we mail to clients)

The *most* important thing, though, is to make sure people *want* to use
your system. It's no good just putting a load of things in place and then
saying "Lo! Management have spoken! You shall use the intranet!"

The most popular page on our intranet is the staff list (the one that lists
who's who, where they work, what they do, who they manage, etc). At first
glance this appears stupid - after all, there's only 100 people here, we
know each other pretty well. It turns out the reason it's the most popular
page is because everyone has a scanned photo on there as well, and people
really like seeing their mugshot on a web page.

I think spending some of your development time on these "softer" features -
a question of the week, pictures of the staff, the menu for lunch in the
canteen - can really pay dividends. Don't focus purely on the "make money
and enhance the business" side of things, look at the "make your working
environment more pleasant" aspects as well.

I'd also suggest a "launch party" of some sort. We rolled out our Intranet
in the run up to Christmas with fifty hidden Christmas present .gifs, and
whoever found the most won a bottle of champagne. Despite the fact that we
now have 20 more staff than we did then, the traffic *still* hasn't gone
back up to the levels it was at for that first week. This sort of thing can
be repeated every 6 months or so, or whenever you've got enough new features
that you want to force everyone to explore the whole system again ;-)

Hope this gave you some ideas, good luck with the project!

Cheers
Jon




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