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1 Intranets
Organizations have been implementing intranets for a number of years, expecting to gain efficiencies and improve information exchange among their employees. Based on an organization's objectives, an intranet can take many different forms, ranging from a corporate information and communication platform to a pragmatic approach to Knowledge Management.
This whitepaper specifically focuses on the lifeblood of intranets: content.
Employees empowered with timely and relevant information, work more efficiently and intelligently. Therefore, businesses need to ensure that employees have unrestricted access to all content relevant to their jobs.
1.1 Business Objectives
A successful intranet starts with clear business objectives
Many intranet projects have started without explicit business objectives, and as a result, lack the senior
management support that is required to get the acquired resources and budgets allocated.
Using BluePrint Modelling, Tridion Professional Services and Tridion Partners can help set clear business objectives for an intranet, and translate these business objectives into an effective and efficient intranet. For examples of Tridion-based intranet implementations please read section 4, Tridion Intranet Customer Cases.
1.2 Compliance with European Directives
New European legislation now also drives the need for intranets: European Directive 2002/14/EC establishes a framework for informing and consulting employees. This Directive gives employees the right to be informed about the economic situation of the business, employment prospects, and decisions that are likely to lead to substantial changes in the work organization.
2 Content and Intranets
Most organizations realise that they cannot see their intranet decoupled from their Internet and/or extranet. The reasoning is simple: the content that is used for the Internet will be a subset of the intranet content.
Your intranet contains your internal content. Your Internet contains content that you share with visitors and prospects, and your extranet contains content that you share with your partners and customers. Much of the content can be reused for each of these channels. An efficient intranet setup will recognise this fact, and address this as a multi-channel publishing solution that operates from a single source of content. More information on how to implement this can be found in section 3.2, BluePrinting an Intranet.
2.1 The Content Management Challenge
Intranets are all about content; figure 2 illustrates the intranet lifecycle. The intranet lifecycle consists of Employees contributing and consuming content from the intranet.
Intranets are often implemented without a content management backbone. Without a doubt content management is a key component in effectively deploying business-to-employee (B2E) applications and share and leverage information among employees. Organizations need a system to systematically contribute, manage and deliver content in a secure and personalised way.
2.1.1 Contributing Content
For a successful Intranet it is essential that it is very easy for any user to contribute content. Content contribution should not require technical expertise or (re)education. It should also be very simple and quick to update content: any intranet will only be successful if it can be guaranteed that it will always contain the latest up-to-date versions of a document.
Most users will want to work with the desktop clients they are familiar with, e.g. a browser, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel. In addition to this, it should be possible to contribute content from the Intranet itself, or from other browser based interfaces running in a Web site or portal.
2.1.2 The Content Lifecycle
Once content is stored in the intranet it becomes part of the intranet lifecycle. Content management functions are required to enable organizations to get 'in control' of their intranet content lifecycle. Effectively this means functionality like Role-Based Security, Logging & Auditing, Versioning, Workflow, Translation Management, Full Text Search and Hyperlink Management.
2.1.3 Content Delivery Channels
Most intranets deliver content to employees via the Web, using standard delivery servers, such as Web servers, Portal Servers and Application Servers. With the advent of 3G mobile networks, there will be a growing need for delivery to mobile devices, pushing the requirements for an intranet to deliver content to any device in any format.
2.1.4 Content Overload: Search and Retrieval
Information overload can be a killer for any intranet. A smart intranet is able to offer multiple navigational models, for example a topic-based navigational model. Using Portal technology opens the door to personalization of intranet pages, targeting the information to the specific needs of an employee.
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