There are many good examples of Intranet Managers / Comms Teams creating videos to highlight a new intranet to employees. A great list of examples has been put together by Ellen van Aken and can found on the link below.
There are many good examples of Intranet Managers / Comms Teams creating videos to highlight a new intranet to employees. A great list of examples has been put together by Ellen van Aken and can found on the link below.
Very helpful guide to creating colour coded events on your SharePoint Calendar.
I started writing an Intranet Manifesto in one of my last jobs but never managed to finish it. Jesper Bylund has gone one better and finished his and added it to his very excellent blog for all to see. Inspiring stuff! Read it below.
Intranet Manifesto for the Swedish city of Malmö: http://jesperby.com/2012/03/14/our-intranet-manifesto/
Came accross a very strange issue where users in a wiki site could not create new pages even when given Full Control permission.
Users see the access denied pages even when they have full control or design rights. When they create the page they get the typical “Error: Access Denied” page and can either sign in as another user or request access.
The reason they couldn’t create a new page turned out to be because they did not have read rights on the Master Pages gallery.
Very annoying but at least I found the answer after lot’s of head-scratching.
Listed below are some aspects to intranets built with SharePoint 2010 that most would love to have. This would be the intranet utopia. Maybe something like this is already out there!?
I’m sure there are others that I’m missing so feel free to add yours in the comments.
About 8 weeks ago I was tasked to develop a new intranet for all LBi Sweden staff using SharePoint 2010. The criteria was to create a fun and creative intranet using ‘out of the box’ web parts with no major customisation (the last intranet was heavily customised and was pretty much unusable). Over the past 8 weeks I have done much including:
– Formed an intranet project team to help drive the development of the new intranet
– Produced an intranet survey to get feedback from staff and then analysed those results
– Used the results from the survey to prioritise our workload
– Ran a naming competion to get all staff to submit a new name for the intranet. The Core was the winner.
– Learnt how to hate and then slowly understand how the SP2010 editing ribbon works (I’m still seeing quirks!)
– Learnt how to work with SP2010 (lots of differences to SP2007 in my opinion)
– Migrated and updated relevant content from the old intranet site to The Core
– Worked with our IT department to get AD up to date (Woohoo!)
– Created intranet governance for all content i.e. Document Owners, Content Owners, News Owners etc
– Provide relevant training to staff who will update their content
– Got approval and sign off from senior manangement
– Provided a ‘soft launch’ to all staff
– Built a solid foundation on which to refine and enhance The Core
The last point is fairy major one. We have just taken a step in the right direction with this launch but now we have a new intranet site and sufficient intranet governance in place to continue refining and enhancing The Core.
We’ve done a lot in 8 weeks but we still have a lot to do.
Our current intranet at LBi Sweden has no governance in place at all so I’m starting from scratch with the basics. There are many documents on Zone but I’m finding files that were written back in 2008 and still have the old company name on them (FramFab)! I’ve tasked the relevant people with updating / deleting them before I migrate them over to our new SP2010 platform. A thankless task but someone has to do it!
I’m now creating a central document area on our new intranet. Rather than have folders I am creating a uniquie content type with some relevant metadata field (author, author review date, description, category). All files will be in one document library and will require metadata in order to aid search.
A great little guide on how to Create & Add Multiple Content Types to a Document Library in SharePoint 2010 can be found on YouTube. This was created by TTRcorp who have also produced some other great tutorials on various aspects of SP2010.
A very nice tip on how to remove the the Recently modified items from the quick launch of a wiki can be found here.
Do the following:
1. Insert content editor webpart
2. Click to edit web part
3. Click to add text
4. In the edit ribbon click on Format text tab
5. Click HTML and choose Edit HTML source
6. Paste in the script below
<style type=”text/css”>
.s4-recentchanges
{
display:none;
} <
/style>
7. Hide the content editor webpart by changing the chrome type to none
8. Save page
Nice and simple. A much better way than editing source files!
There are some wierd and wonderfull names for intranets out there. Ones that I have worked with include; Staff Central (Parkinson’s UK), MCCCNET (Marie Curie Cancer Care) and Interchange (LloydsTSB). I’ve also seen some other great and innovatiove intranet names including Colin, Simon, WOW and The Sauce (The name of the New Zealand Post’s intranet – a play on being the ‘source’ of all knowledge and because it will cover everything.)
A positive move to get staff’s interest in their intranet is to set up a naming competition. This helps to drum up interest and get the creative juices flowing. We’re currently doing this at LBi Sweden. Our current intranet (the Zone) is largely unloved so we are looking to update it with a new name and new structure on SP 2010. Hopefully it won’t result in us naming it Zone 2.0. Watch this space.
Some organisations have the name of their intranet on this very helpful list from intranet matters: http://intranet-matters.de/intranet-names/. Something to take inspiration from.
A very good discussion about intranet names can also be found on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=2289431&type=member&item=28568535
Senior management at LBi Sweden have tasked me with migrating their existing intranet (called Zone) from SP2007 to SP2010. I have 8 weeks to do it while dealing with all my other day to day work for clients! Now the fun begins! So much to do but I can’t wait.
The Intranet Guru 