Wiki Works - the workhorse of any social intranet

Blogs are cool, social bookmarking sites are neat, but I really think wikis are the big news in the intranet 2.0 space.

At our company, we launched a wiki last fall (almost a year ago now...wow!) and it has mostly become the internal wikipedia. The wiki contains a lot of glossary terms pulled from all over the company from different business unit's websites. This has made it much simpler to find what the specialized terminology of our business means.

However I want more! I have been using the wiki for all my intranet documentation, support lists, application change logs, etc. But how do I get other people interested?

I see one problem with our setup, a slightly modified version of Screwturn Wiki, has no security. Sure it tracks who wrote what, but I would love to have a bit more partitioning, like the Workspaces concept in Socialtext's workspace concept, allowing separate work areas for projects teams, wikipedias, and onboarding, to name a few.

So what are your thoughts for wikis in the social intranet?

Building a better "Employee Chooser"

I have been faced with a UI design problem on our Performance Management system that I am currently building.



There is one area within the site where leaders have the ability to choose another employee within the company to request feedback for one of their direct report's performance review. This is simple stuff, except the UI bit for picking what employee to send the request to.



I have written a couple other apps in the past that needed to do this type of work, but I really did not like the solutions I came up with, namely some type of a drop down list or select list with all the names listed. Problem is, with over 4k employees...this is a really long list.



I like the idea of a type-ahead search box that could show the name, title and photo of a group of employees based on the search string entered. Something like Google's Enterprise Labs "Search as you Type" plug-in for the Google Search Appliance.


So what other ideas do you all have? Please leave me a comment!

Creating a social media strategy for your business

I attended a free webinar yesterday put on by JibberJobber.com's Jason Alba and People-OnTheGo titled Social Networking in Action.

The discussion centered around building up your business by using social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and Twitter. Very interesting stuff and worth checkingo out Jason's slide deck and site @ http://www.jibberjobber.com/.

I am not sure if they will offer up a recording of the webnar, but you might want to watch the People-OnTheGo site.

"Avoiding the intranet dumpster" - Ragan.com

There is a great new video from the fine folks at ragan.com about how to keep you intranet content fresh and avoid hosting an "information dumpster."

• practical content
• easy to find
• interactive
• community

That's what the social intranet is all about!

Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website? I don't think so.

Is low value content the problem with intranets? I am not sure it is or not. In blog post by Gerry McGovern over at CMSwire, Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website, has some interesting information.

Most data and content that we create is next to useless. Nobody will ever be interested in looking at it again.

He also mentions that the corporate intranet is a dumping ground for company information because companies have no clear standard of where to put this stuff. Well, where does he suggest it go? In my 10 years of developing intranet sites, the reason the data exists is because someone needs it. It may be a loss leader in hits, but there is still a need.

I would rather see a bunch of infrequently used pages exist on the intranet rather than some word doc sitting on someones hard-drive or worse yet, lost forever when an employee is termed.

This seems to me to be one of the best use cases for social networking, specifically the wiki. It gives employees a place to quickly and easily empty their brains and get back on with the task at hand. The other upside, is for you GTD readers, it helps make mind like water!

Tapping into the Cornucopia: Twitter usage in corporate settings

Check out this interesting post on twitter on the intranet...

Tapping into the Cornucopia: Twitter usage in corporate settings

Disconnected CMS

Today, I launched a new piece of the puzzle in our intranet, a Content Management System. Yes, I know, we are way behind the times... We have been using a home grown CMS for our external website for years now, but the intranet (i.e. the ugly step sister up till last year) has had it's static content authored in Front Page since the inception.

It took so long to get a CMS into the fray due to the huge amount of work it would take to implement a traditional CMS system that includes page templates and the like. So we created a "disconnected CMS."

This system consists of two parts, a ASP.NET administration tool that allows authors to create content and a JavaScript function that uses AJAX to asynchronously request the data to be displayed on the page.

The administration site is secured by content groups or categories. Each author, which we have about 40, will be given one or more content groups for their sites. These groups can contain multiple pieces of content and multiple authors. Authors are restricted to only the content groups they are a member of. Any changes to the content are stored in a SQL server and versioned (with optional comments) so that authors can review and revert back to older content if needed.

The JavaScript function takes in the GUID of the content item and returns back the HTML string that represents the content. The AJAX call is done via the Prototype framework which allows multiple async calls on each page.

This system should greatly reduce the number of times a day I get requests to publish Front Page content and allows authors to update their websites over time to the new system.

I should have some hard data on usage in the next month or so to determine if this solution can really scale like I think it will.

Creating the buzz

It is always the last thing you think of, or at least it is the last thing I think of: Creating a buzz around new intranet features.

Our current routine for a new "major" feature is to create a "spotlight" that includes an image and/or screenshot, header, text and link that lives on the intranet homepage for three or four days. We also create a blog post on our "intranet news" blog that gets a few reads ( < 1% of employees ). We try not to send out mass emails since people don't read those from our HR department now (that leads to another future post).

What are your ideas about building buzz around new intranet features?

Life in the trenches

I know, I know...another blog about social intranet or Enterprise 2.0.

I hope to use this space to discuss "life in the trenches" at a mid-sized new media retail company that up to about a year ago, it's intranet consisted of all static content with a few disjointed applications thrown in.

Today, the intranet has grown to be a bit more cohesive (in look & feel, search, and navigation) and includes a wiki and a socialized employee yellow pages application. Better, but still room for improvement!

So, in this blog I plan on discussing my experiences including technical issues, politics, working with partners, and making sure you spend your time and intranet budget wisely.