Content Management Matters ™

According to Web CMS favorite Ektron, there's more to social networking than posting incriminating pictures of last night's beer-pong tournament or pasting witty comments and YouTube clips on your friend's profiles.

The Ektron Intranet, which takes the ideas of popular social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and puts them in the office, enables the controlled, collaborative creation and managed distribution of business documents on the corporate intranet.

One could argue that the usefulness and importance of an organization's intranet is a key indicator of said organization's health as a company.

In other words, successful and progressive companies understand that an intranet is a vital tool for the daily productivity of the workforce. Struggling and backward-thinking companies see an intranet as a nice-to-have but with no real strategic value.

In an effort to recognize the companies that understand the competitive advantage that can be gained from a thriving corporate intranet, Australia-based intranet experts Step Two Designs are happy to announce the recipients of the 2007 Intranet Innovation Awards.

A global competition, the awards are intended to highlight specific intranet improvements and not intranets as a whole.

The managing director of Step Two Designs, James Robertson, describes the awards like this:

“While almost every organisation has an intranet, it is often gets little visibility. This is about bringing the true value of these sites into the light”

The 2007 winners include:

• Fiat - Platinum Award Winner, for its "Avanti e Veloci" web portal ("Fast and Forward")
• QBE - Gold Award Winner, for the online "Investigator Wizard"
• Perkins Eastman - for the creation of "Practice Area Communities"
• The City of Casey in Australia and SunGard AvantGard - for enhancements to the intranet staple: the Phone Directory
• The Environment Agency in the UK - for the development of a new set of staff personas
• Nycomed - for bringing product information from across a global enterprise into a single location

If you are proud of your company's intranet and want to be in the running for the 2008 awards, entries can be submitted beginning in March.

For more information, please visit the online home of our friends at Step Two Designs.

Building and maintaining an Intranet can be challenging. For one, it's not always clear to everyone what the goals of an Intranet are. It may not be embraced by senior management, nor is it always structured well due to lack of resources and staff. So what to do when your Intranet is stifled?

Most everyone suffers from challenges in implementing an Intranet. For those who need a little support, the following will help.

The theory of intranet personalization is wonderful. The practice is generally woeful: hugely expensive implementations that totally fail; massive maintenance overheads and very little employee uptake.

In the historical context of the organization, the intranet is definitely the new kid on the block. Properly managed, the future for intranets is very bright indeed.

Those who created information rarely had to worry about the impact of what they wrote. Until the Web.

Hey, champ. Ever wonder how your intranet stands up against another company's? It's probably tough to gauge, considering asking about another enterprise's back-end is a little awkward.

With that devastating curiosity in mind, Intranet Dashboard just compiled a survey on global intranet use and trends that aims to answer all your burning questions.

Intranet-specific software company Intranet DASHBOARD just released key data with global intranet usage and trends in tangent with its launch for Intranet DASHBOARD 2.0. Intranet DASHBOARD recently pulled in a couple of honors at the Product of the Year Awards.

And no, we're not talking about Hobbits and dancing.

Its not often that Microsoft gets beat in the intranet and collaboration game -- what with its market leading SharePoint (MOSS) flying off the shelves and garnering much recent media attention.

Intranet search performs miserably because most organizations do not properly manage their content.