Self-Service Intranet Portals Feed the Need
Why Self-Service?
Self-service intranet publishing puts you, the business owner, in charge of your content so you and your management team can keep your site Current, Complete, Consistent, and Compelling. These four pillars of web publishing will draw your audience, and keep them coming back, to your intranet portal.Many companies have governance policies for business application ownership, but IT governance is not why business self-service is a good idea. Portal content management is a basic business practice: as basic, and as neglected, as cleaning out the office fridge.
Feeding IT: Information as Food and Water
In an IT enterprise--indeed, in most large enterprises today--information is essential. As basic as food and water, information fuels our teams and business processes, and information is what we feed our clients and partners. Like food, information must be grown, harvested, processed, and consumed--each and every day, by each and every employee. Like water, it must be channeled, cleaned, stored, and released to manage both floods and droughts, to water the seeds of new ideas and to power huge datamarts. Self-service intranet publishing increases enterprise capacity to share "fresh food and clean water," and make complete, current, consistent and compelling information available on the intranet, every day, around the globe.
When Intranets Go Bad
- "This site is useless. It's all out of date."
- "Oh, we don't do it like that anymore."
- "That site was just for the field offices."
- "That was just for the reorg, and those people aren't here anymore."
- 'This place is a document graveyard."
- "It's too hard/too technical/too complicated to change anything."
- "Our webmaster left, and that's not my job."
Collaborate in the Kitchen, Publish in the Dining Room
Creativity is messy, and creative partners have to trust each other. Keep your cooking in the kitchen on your collaboration site for your team or project, where everyone can pitch in. Serve up regular "meals" on your publishing portal, and keep the servings fresh so people will come back for more.
Clean Out The Fridge
Some content has a long and stable shelf life, other kinds go stale fast. Use SharePoint's site administration tools to set expiration dates on Announcements, filter FAQ and Discussion Board items with few replies, and use Content and Structure View to move old or unused content into a subsite for archiving.
Eat Your Own Cooking
If you don't use your intranet site, who will? Make sure that your site is the place where your management posts announcements, events, strategy and vision documents, FAQ, and other core content for your group. Make your Leadership page something that your leaders will want to show their fellow chief executives. Engage new and onboarding employees, particularly junior staff, and their managers to browse the group portal and thenreview and provide feedback on what they learned about your group.
Let Your Menu Reflect What You're Serving Today
Your site menu combines published content with dynamic navigation. Using the About Our Team info in your Team Directory, work with each of your management team to identify the information they produce for a global audience, and then publish it to your site tagged with their team and categories.SharePoint provides a rich set of dynamic navigation features that make good use of metadata. But remember, the most elaborate menu won't satisfy if the dish you select isn't there in the first place.
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