What constitutes an intranet? Shape; size; components? There is, of course, no single answer to this. Intranets are constantly evolving and many have moved beyond the firewall. Today, most intranets are made up of a number of joint-up components and systems; each with a (more or less clearly defined!) purpose; each added or implemented for different reasons. Home-made bolt-on solutions have been products of ad-hoc demands, haven’t always been particularly elegant. Buyers now have an alternative to this in the shape of the increasing number of focused intranet vendors.
A number of focused intranet vendors are beginning to appear on the radar including:
- US-based Adenin, which has been named to the “EContent 100″, EContent magazine’s 2009-2010 list of the 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry
- Canadian ThoughtFarmer, focusing on the “social intranet” is one bidder claiming to have a great solution and previously featured on these pages with an impressive intranet phonebook at the Guardian
- Australian Intranet DASHBOARD is another; an off-the-shelf solution which allows the customer to design and tailor a comprehensive, fully fledged intranet using mainly drag and drop widgets and wizards. Shell specifically deployed Intranet Dashboard as a part of a strategy to reduce the number of applications they have.
Are you curious about this emerging market trend? The good folks at Intranet DASHBOARD will be in Philadelphia as sponsors of the event and available for a demo or conversation about their experiences. Grab them over lunch or in the sessions and talk to them about their vision for the future of intranets.
Out-of-the-box intranet; too good to be true? What is your take?
EphraimJF April 23rd, 2010 14:18
Thanks for this post Lau. I have two main points to make in response.
OUT-OF-THE-BOX INTRANETS NEED LOTS OF CONFIGURATION & MANAGEMENT
In my experience, out-of-the-box (OOTB) intranet software can provide very good value. But you’ve got to know what you’re getting into and invest properly. OOTB intranets aren’t like lamps that you just plug in and turn on. They’re more like… well, like this:
Once you’ve done the server-side technical work to get your OOTB intranet software installed and working properly with your network infrastructure, you have to spend a lot of time creating pages and groups (or whatever, depending on the tool you choose) and building a complete site structure. You have to tinker with tons of non-code administration controls to get your site working just the way you need it to. Then you have to test it with real users to see if all your setup work was done correctly.
Then you have to plan for use of your OOTB intranet site. This means working with key departments to set up your human content responsibilities, migrating content and piloting the site to identify training needs, common questions, and problems. You’ve got to create a complete communications and adoption plan for your new intranet and you’ve got to have a plan to get feedback on an ongoing basis and how to incorprorate that into ongoing site improvements.
You’ve got to build intranet experts throughout the organziation, as well as teach folks best practices for using the tool you chose. You’ll want to ensure that content producers learn about web writing best practices that ensure usable and findable information.
Etc, etc, etc. Point being, that an out-of-the-box intranet solution requires a lot of work if you want to get a lot of value out of it.
LITTLE TRUST FOR eCONTENT MAGAZINE, KMWORLD, ETC
You listed that Adenin was listed in EContent’s top 100 list. Please beware of these lists from eContent, KM World, and any other publications from Information Today, Inc. (http://www.infotoday.com/contacts.shtml#online).
Adenin is a great product and I’m sure they belong on the list, but I have doubts about the journalistic practices of these magazines. From my experience, many of the articles in KM World and related magazines are written by vendor representatives and are basically veiled marketing products. That’s okay on a vendor’s blog, but I find it off-putting in an industry magazine. It’s hard for me to trust a magazine with that sort of practice.
Just sayin…
eIntranet: A costly toolbox for stage 1 intranets | J. Boye February 12th, 2011 14:18
[...] eIntranet has more social capabilities than established intranet competitors (see recent coverage: Focused intranet vendors; moving in on the market?), but with a list price of USD 250,000 for an organisation with 4,000 users, eIntranet is also not [...]