In line with this reorganization, a major project has been launched to improve the web presence of the police. All regional websites that exist now for the various police offices will be replaced by a single web environment.

So how do you manage a web project of this size and complexity, with 17 million Dutch citizens eagerly awaiting the release date? Read on to discover why these 3 elements were critical to success:

1. Define clear objectives
2. Find the right partner
3. Apply the principles of Agile software development

Objectives and timeline for the project

The objectives of the project can be split in two categories: operational and technical.

The key operational objective is the introduction of a single ‘Digital Police Office’ for all Dutch citizens. The purpose is not only to make all interactions between people and police more efficient, but also to involve the population directly in the crime-fighting activities of the police.

The technical objective is to implement a single Content Management System (CMS) that will store all relevant content and deliver it to the multiple channels that the Digital Police Office supports (from TV to website, tablet and smartphone).

Ron de Milde is the Programme Manager responsible for the creation and implementation of this innovative Digital Police Office. Ron is leading a diverse team of 40 people with many different skills, ranging from communications specialists to IT professionals and developers.

The project started in September 2011, when Ron’s team was formed and the initial analysis started. Only 8 months later, in May 2012, the complete platform is undergoing final testing, ready to be rolled out as per plan! No small achievement, given the size of the task at hand…

Transforming more than 400(!) local websites into 1

All regional police websites will be migrated to a single web environment. This is a daunting task for Ron and his team: There are currently more than 400 active websites, built on a variety of web content management systems. The objective of the project is to migrate all of these into a single content management system.

The screenshot below gives you a sneak preview of the future home page (www.politie.nl):

Another project challenge is that the current application landscape around intranet and extranet is fragmented, resulting in a limited content and information exchange. The expectation is that a central web content management system will improve the content exchange between regional police offices and will simplify the management and maintenance of the system.

The Digital Police Office – also on your smartphone!

A key objective of the project is to engage online with the Dutch citizens and involve them in fighting crime. For instance, citizens can help the police solve cases by sending photographs or videos from the crime scene, using their smartphone. They will also be able to report a crime online, from their mobile or from home, without the need to visit a police station. Social media features will be used to gather citizens’ input and solve cases quicker.

Clearly, mobile delivery is a big part of the value proposition. The public will be served local information from a single nationwide content platform. The mobile applications will be location-aware, allowing citizens to see information about the local police personnel, quickly retrieve contact information for the nearest police station, and see any local news, missing persons etc.

Other features of this innovative ‘Digital Police Office’ include:

• A personal page with a secure login based on digital ID technology
• A mobile-friendly editing tool, for editors to update content while on the move
• RSS feed
• Online condolence register

Under the hood: A single content management system

Hippo is a Dutch CMS specialist and the provider of a modern CMS product, based on open source technology and particularly popular in the Dutch public sector.

The National Police selected Hippo CMS as their preferred environment because of its scalability and appropriateness for the complex needs, including security, of the National Police along with the benefits of central management of applications and content.

An important strength of the Hippo CMS is that it is well designed to store content once and deliver to multiple channels, in such a way that these different channels support and complement each other. For instance, a user may see a TV special announcement about a missing person, and then consult more details about the case – or just replay the announcement – on a second screen, for instance a tablet.

A key success factor: bring the team together

The experience of many J. Boye members in our various groups with big, ambitious projects like this is not always positive. Very often projects fail to deliver against the high expectations of the various stakeholders and the end users.

Ron was very much aware of this risk and took a number of steps to reduce it. The key success factor has been to work in the spirit of agile software development, using the Scrum methodology with sprint sessions and daily stand-up meetings. Bringing the full team physically together in one place was a major contributor to success: the frequent face-to-face interactions between communications and IT people helped to avoid any misunderstandings about requirements and made quick decisions possible. As Ron de Milde puts it:

Daily stand-up team meetings are a great way to focus on the activities for the day and get any potential roadblocks cleared (Ron de Milde, Programme Manager)

In a world where virtual teams are becoming more and more common, it’s an important reminder for all of us to see the benefits of face-to-face discussion in action!

Learn more

• J. Boye conferences: Ron will present the case of the Dutch National Police at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, May 8-10, 2012.
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye groups across Europe and North America, and share your web and intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• Cases: For additional interesting cases, such as the responsive design work done by Jyske Bank, check out the case studies on the J. Boye blog.

Yes, SharePoint holds many promises but many of you are not yet getting your full bang for the buck. Why is that the case, and what can you do to solve it?

SharePoint: designed for easy sharing

SharePoint has a come a long way since the early days, back in 2001, when SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint Team Services were launched. In the years after that, other building blocks were added along the way, as illustrated in this SharePoint history chart, but it wasn’t until the release of MOSS 2007 that these building blocks were brought together into a single integrated platform. The 2007 release of SharePoint has seen tremendous business success: it combined collaboration, portal, search, content management, business forms and business intelligence into one consistent piece of software. The exponential rise of SharePoint in the enterprise has been further stimulated by the much-anticipated and significantly improved 2010 release. The rest is history…

Ever since the origins of the SharePoint family, today a multi-billion dollar product suite, sharing has been at the core. Essentially everything is a list – you can put things in lists and share them with your colleagues. This fundamentally simple concept has certainly contributed to the overwhelming success of SharePoint around the world.

But somehow organisations are not yet getting their full bang for the buck. Often it already goes wrong at the start, when SharePoint is introduced with a focus on IT aspects, cost and project management, rather than from a genuine understanding of sharing as a new business model. Others claim that the product is too complex for most end users, and as Steve Krug taught us many years ago:

If something is hard to use, I just don’t use it as much. (Steve Krug, ‘Don’t Make Me Think’)

Snapshot of today’s trends in SharePoint usage

At J. Boye we regularly discuss this topic with the many SharePoint users in our various intranet groups. From this, I have derived the 4 following trends – confirmed by industry reports – about how SharePoint is actually deployed and used:

1)  SharePoint’s most popular feature is the usage of Team Sites and workspaces for collaboration, closely followed by intranet sites and news portals. A complete list is shown in the figure below: (from the AIIM Market Intelligence report on the usage of SharePoint)

2)  SharePoint is often deployed in parallel, and not as a replacement of, other enterprise systems and the traditional intranet. While this approach allows for flexibility and time to run proper pilots, it’s inherently a duplication of effort and of infrastructure.

3)  The most common challenge mentioned by our members is user adoption. SharePoint is often perceived as complex, non-user friendly, and not mainstream within the organization (for instance, used by IT only or at headquarters only, and not in the rest of the organization).

4)  Deploy first, do strategy later: Organizations rush into deployment and piloting without clear objectives. I’ve discussed this in more detail in an article about how to leverage the social features of SharePoint, which will be a big topic at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, May 8-10, 2012.

Not present at time of photo: sharing!

True sharing needs to go beyond just deploying the latest technology and hoping for the best. I’ve discussed the idea of sharing on your intranet in a previous article. I’m convinced that SharePoint can support sharing in many different ways, but today only limited progress has been made:

• Social features: Employees need to be able to connect with each other and share opinions, experiences and common interests. The My Sites functionality of SharePoint is a great place to start doing this, but many organizations are struggling with adoption and quality of information.
• Mobile access: True sharing means access to information anywhere, anytime, not just from behind an office desk. While mobile support is much improved in SharePoint 2010, most organization do not yet see mobile access as a priority or are struggling with the consequences of ‘Bring Your Own Device’
• Collaboration: This is the area where SharePoint has made the biggest impact, but still many organizations are not leveraging the full potential. Sharing of knowledge is often limited to departmental Team Sites, reducing SharePoint de facto to a glorified system of shared network drives.
• User experience: Poor usability is often quoted as a major roadblock to SharePoint adoption. Often the technology is deployed ‘out of the box’, with little or no customization or integration with an existing intranet. Sharing and caring are difficult if the technology is working against you!

The solution? Focus and show you care!

No, there is no single right way to introduce SharePoint in your organisation. The platform is very versatile, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time. From my experience, the trick is to focus: pick one particular business benefit that you want to achieve, such as sharing of employee knowledge, and then focus your attention and resources on that area.

And if you really care about getting the most out of SharePoint, then show it by ensuring that the platform is introduced with the right focus. Make sure that the focus is not exclusively on IT, technology or vendors, but care enough to adapt and customize the software to your end users’ needs.

Next steps for your SharePoint intranet

• Learn from the best: The SharePoint conference track at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, from May 8-10, has some excellent case studies on how this approach can be successful! Not yet registered for the SharePoint conference track at J. Boye Philadelphia 12? Then secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: SharePoint implementation projects are often discussed – and compared! – in our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America.
• How does your intranet measure up? We’ll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

At accountancy firm BDO Danmark, a part of BDO International, they have managed to turn time tracking into an intranet killer app by making the unusual decision to place it prominently on the intranet front page. In less than 6 months after launch, the average number of working days that were not time tracked were reduced by 50%!

I spoke to Lars Kjær, Manager – IT Development at BDO in Herning, Denmark, who shared additional details about this innovative intranet application which was initially launched on their intranet all the way back in 2004.

Previous challenges with time tracking

Before the launch of this business critical intranet application, the business process of tracking time at BDO Denmark was very different from the browser-based interface of today: Employees would log onto the ERP system and use an interface that in the views of many employees was cumbersome to use and required entering specific codes to track time.

Even for the IT professionals among the accountants at BDO, this required some training and some getting used to. While time tracking was also crucial for billing back in 2004 and earlier, it was far from as accurate and up-to-date as one could hope for, as many employees were dragging their feet on the time tracking.

How BDO used the intranet to turn time tracking into a more popular chore

When the project was initiated back in 2004, the very first objective was to make it much easier to track time by building a simpler web-based interface to handle tracking and approvals.

To further motivate employees they decided to make an updated snapshot of the time reports for each team visible directly on the intranet front page.

The screen shot to the right, basically shows the right column of the BDO intranet home page. Labelled BDO Tid (“BDO Time”), you see the fictitious status for April 2012. The graph shows that on this team, 2 employees are marked with red which indicates that they are behind on their time tracking.

Intranet time tracking behind the scenes

The actual time tracking application is built as an ASP.NET webapp, which is then inserted into the Microsoft SharePoint-based intranet.

Back in 2004, BDO was using SharePoint 2003 and the initial development was done in-house and took about a month of work in total, including development, testing and deployment.

Since then several improvements have been implemented and SharePoint has also been upgraded to 2010.

Learn more about intranet killer apps

You can several examples of innovative and popular intranet applications among other J. Boye group members, including:

• Arla made their intranet more social
• Judge Group did an intranet redesign and got a fat footer
• Nordea People Book
• Perkins Eastman uses the intranet to help people

Next steps for your intranet

• Learn from the best: Not yet registered for the intranet conference track at J. Boye Philadelphia 12? Then secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Intranet killer applications are often discussed – and compared! – in our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America.
• How does your intranet measure up? We’ll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

As many web professionals have recognized, a web site won’t last. There seems to be a clear disconnect between the common managerial perception of the corporate website as something static, while the web team recognizes that to make best use of the Web, you should frequently improve your web pages as you learn along the way. The problem is that built-to-change websites don’t go far enough and have their own particular set of problems.

Built-to-change websites are not manageable

If there is one constant theme across the many J. Boye groups for web professionals, it is that there never seems to be enough resources dedicated to the web team. Trade-offs are constantly made in an effort to avoid having an outdated or even broken website. Even those companies where the website is the most important revenue stream, are struggling to look beyond the best-selling products and build a truly great website. The long tail dream is really more like a garbage trail.

Over the past decade many experts have written about how the Web impacts organisations and how it enables us to incorporate change into business processes. To quote Irish Web expert Gerry McGovern from his article on From built-to-last to built-to-change:

The Web demands a new model of management: from built-to-last to built-to-change. Internally, most large organizational systems are designed to be robust, secure and future-proof. However, they often end up being slow, cumbersome and rigid

Yes, the Web enables business transformation, but we can’t keep focusing on change in order to manage the web. If you believe that websites tend to need constant updating, why worry about building something to last? The problem with this “change is constant” strategy is that few organisations have enough resources to constantly update and improve their websites. In reality what happens, is that the web team is always running behind, chasing from one project to another, fixing what most urgently needs fixing and whilst patching up the rest of the website to the best of their abilities.

The content explosion will cost you a fortune tomorrow

Beyond the never-ending stream of changes, another thing that is plaguing most web teams is the content explosion that is a reality for almost all websites. Website content is growing at an already unmanageable rate.

During the past decade many organisations have deployed content management systems, hoping that IT would somehow save the day. Some have also deployed wiki, blogs and a handful of other tools. These systems generally introduce a helpful layer of management, but the unintended consequence is that it actually make it much easier for your colleagues to create additional content. That means you end up with an alarming growth of content.

This aquarium of content that organisations are doing their best to keep healthy, is turning into an excruciatingly expensive eco-system for tomorrow:

• Your next website redesign will certainly be much more expensive than the last one
• Changing tools, e.g. from one content management system to another, will only become riskier and more complex
• Forget about search as even the most expensive search engines are not going to return meaningful results from your ocean of content

We need a better way.

Kill your darlings and build sharing into your website

How about we started the next web project somewhere else: Not by emphasising change, not by making it even easier to create more content and certainly not with technology. To really manage the web, we will probably need to kill some of our darlings, both in terms of how we’ve approached digital projects so far and also in terms of what needs to go on the website.

A trend is emerging where “sharing” is entered into the equation to better manage the web. Think of sharing as the thing that naturally succeeds open. Sharing means that other people can contribute. Sounds scary and vague? It means you need to take a wider, more integrated approach and look at your web presence as a whole. Not just the corporate site, but the entire new media universe in your organisation including Facebook pages, Twitter, YouTube channel, blogs and video.

Here’s how you get started:

• At a high-level, you need to allow sharing and don’t restrict what you have on your website by copyright or any such things.
• At a practical level, make it easy to share what you have, whether this means that a website visitor can share something on Facebook or whether a programmer can take your content and apps and turn them into something completely different.

The most important darling to be killed is the illusion of control. Web managers and in particular the senior management above them, like to be in control of the key informational assets that go on the website. They prefer to control how they are used.

Those that really are reaping the business benefits from the Web are right now thinking about how they can set their information assets free, so that others can easily leverage them. Built-to-share means less content. Many have already found that much of their existing content is redundant, outdated and trivial. Essentially content that wastes time and certainly nobody wants to share. Unfortunately few web managers  have the mandate to simply clean the mess.

Learn more: Find better ways to manage the web

Benefit from the shared experience of others:

• Maersk Line uses social media to interact with customers
• UPM explores the one page website

Sharing is caring is the theme for the upcoming J. Boye 12 Philadelphia conference in May

• Social features allow employees to connect with each other and share opinions, experiences and common interests
• Mobile access is enabling the sharing of information anywhere, anytime, not just from behind an office desk
• Collaboration tools make it possible to find and share knowledge faster, better and cheaper
• There is moreover a renewed focus on re-designing the intranet to integrate all of the above into a single user experience.

Sharing as a new business model?

Sharing does not come naturally to many of us in our daily work. We are not comfortable with making information and assets freely available to all, as we fear that this will undermine our existing business models. And at the office we often lack the time to share our knowledge and learnings with colleagues. It just doesn’t seem to be a priority, especially in the current difficult economic climate full of uncertainty and change.

Yet there are clear cases that illustrate how sharing can be good for business. Early adopters in the museum and higher education world have successfully embraced this new mindset. Janus Boye explores these examples in more detail in his recent article about ‘sharing is caring’ on the web.

Sharing leads to caring – also on your intranet!

The new intranet must first and foremost be a place of sharing. This is the logical next step in an evolution that has brought us an open and transparent work environment, in which employees have access to the tools and the information they need to do their daily jobs. In a ‘sharing’ intranet, employees go one step further and share information about themselves, their skills, experiences, aspirations and passions. Most of all, they unlock knowledge that, when shared, will benefit the organization in many ways:

• identify talent across the organisation (one of the 5 intranet trends that I talked about last year)
• more innovation by breaking down silos
• faster integration of newly merged or acquired businesses
• better and faster customer service

There is also an impact on the intranet itself and on the role of the intranet manager. Intranets will become more relevant and business-critical when they promote sharing. Employees will care more about the intranet; they will see it as the place that holds the answer to many business questions, rather than just corporate news articles. The role of intranet manager will change as well, increasingly becoming a community manager and a facilitator rather than a content owner.

Sharing is caring for the social intranet

The social intranet is undoubtedly high on many organizations’ agenda. As the benefits are becoming increasingly clear, more and more organizations are deploying a variety of social features for employees to share opinions, knowledge and interests. Some are starting small with just one or two simple but highly visible features, such as the Facebook-style thumbs up at Danish dairy company Arla. Others such as Capital One and Wells Fargo, two US-based financial institutions, have taken more radical approaches and have done a complete overhaul of their existing intranet.

Sharing is caring for the mobile intranet

Mobile access to the intranet is another must-have in 2012. It makes it possible for employees to access and share information anywhere, anytime. Sharing is best done when it’s on the spot, spontaneous and instantaneous; that’s when it brings the most value. Organizations are starting to realize this and are putting more focus on enterprise mobility, but successful implementations are still few and far between. Some best practices from J. Boye members and conference speakers include the mobile intranet of US consulting and staffing firm The Judge Group, and the award-winning intranet of the UK Houses of Parliament.

Learn more

‘Sharing is caring’ is the central theme of this year’s J. Boye conference in Philadelphia. Not only is sharing – of knowledge and insights – the main objective of the conference, it is also the theme of Michael Edson’s opening keynote and a recurring thread that runs through many presentations. There is a conference track dedicated to intranets, and for the first time there is also a omplete 1-day conference track on SharePoint. Other conference tracks, such as the one on higher education, also include intranet case studies.

Next step for your intranet

• Learn from the best: Not yet registered for the intranet conference track at J. Boye Philadelphia 12? Then secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We’ll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

If you’ve ever been part of a web re-design, you know about the real estate battle, especially the space “above the fold.” Every stakeholder wants their pet link front and center on the home page.  I’ve seen many ‘creative’ menu or site map designs.  There are headers with flyouts or hidden menus that expose themselves when you mouse over them.

When you try and use some of the more innovative approaches you need to explain them and why they are better than your existing approach.  To get buy-in you may have to run usability tests or A/B tests. You can then tweak the design and repeat the testing until everyone is happy – if that is possible!

All of this seems like a waste of time and money.  I think Dan got it right: put everything in the footer.  You don’t need to be concerned with space so you can expose many more second level links.  You can add images or other space hogs in the footer.  Moreover, as it is at the bottom you can use some AJAX tricks to delay loading the footer to prevent any performance hit of downloading and rendering the Fat Footer’s HTML.  You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; I’ve listed a few good resources to design a Fat Footer.

So bask in the glory of having cleared up your front page by introducing a bloated and heavy footer.

Learn more about fat footers

As I’ve learned more about this concept, I’ve enjoyed these articles:

• UI Patterns: Fat Footer
• Seopher: The 7 best fat footers used on high profile sites
• Sitepoint: Ten Fat Footers
• Smashing Magazine: Informative And Usable Footers In Web Design

Next step for your intranet

• Learn from the best: You can still join the J. Boye Philadelphia 12 conference in May, which has both an intranet conference track as well as a user experience conference track.
• Share with the best: This brief article is based on a J. Boye group meeting. Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America.
• How does your intranet measure up? Usability is a part of our intranet benchmarking!

Over the years we’ve been involved in many vendor evaluations, where a customer has changed their Web CMS. There are many important details you should consider and a number of different ways to do it.

As part of our on-going work on best practices for selecting a CMS and our efforts to share more, we’ve now released our sample RFP template free of charge.

A few notes before you get started:

• the template is 5 pages. Try to keep your final version to less than 15 pages. Remember: The longer you make it, the longer the proposals will be. For more, see Why are RFPs always so long?
• it says confidential on top of each page. This is meant as a reminder to vendors not to forward your RFP to others without your permission.
• the RFP should ideally use the term “CMS” sparingly for two reasons: 1) to open up the playing field to the large vendors, eg. IBM and Microsoft, which tends to stay clear of the term and 2) the CMS term is loaded with so many different definitions and expectations that it is actually better to avoid it

Here it is:

• Template: Request for Proposal: New Vendor and Platform (Microsoft Word, 65 Kb)

If you have any questions or ideas for improvements, please do get in touch

Learn more

We’ve written extensively about our lessons learned when it comes to CMS selection on this blog. You can also join one of the J. Boye Groups for web & intranet professionals and meet with others who have gone through vendor selection and implementation projects.

Remarkably, it seems like museums could help us leap into the digital future. Recently, several museums have realized successful projects where they’ve shared their cultural assets, including free sharing of high quality images of art. To better understand the innovative digital agenda at museums and beyond, I spoke to Merete Sanderhoff who is a researcher at the National Gallery of Denmark. She has been involved in several digital museum projects and introduced me to the fascinating sharing is caring trend, which she used as a theme for a conference on digitized cultural heritage in Copenhagen in late 2011.

Read what sharing is caring really means and how it might just be the key differentiator for winning organisations in 2012.

Sharing on the web: Held back by fear and lack of time?

The web is a wonderful invention. When Tim Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal in 1989 for what later became known as the World Wide Web, he focused on the ongoing loss of information, specifically information about accelerators and experiments at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Fast forward to 2012 and the Web has truly become a part of our everyday lives. One thing has not changed: many don’t feel comfortable making key information assets freely and easily available for all. From the outset, the media industries have for example felt the impact of free news shared everywhere on the Web.

Besides the fear of your business being undermined, time is also a factor: No matter where you work, it is hard to find the time to actually sit down and curate and share information. Few have this mentioned in their job description, in particular not in the current economy, where many are mainly concerned with navigating through uncertainty and change.

On the face of it, sharing really seems an altogether unlikely trend in 2012.

Sharing is caring for museums

One of the main pillars in museum practice is to preserve cultural heritage. Traditionally, museums have fulfilled this obligation by being gatekeepers and restricting access to and use of cultural heritage objects.

When cultural heritage is digitized, however, two important things are made possible: Accessibility and participation. The Web is by nature a networked sharing enabler. Digital natives are used to collecting building blocks for their learning and creativity across the web. In that light, museums are rethinking their role in society. The continued relevance of cultural heritage objects may be best ensured by making them freely accessible and reusable in a digital format.

Time for a practical example: Most museums have so far had a steady income stream from selling high-resolution photos of their artwork commercially. Conventional wisdom would dictate that, were museums to share their artwork freely on the Web, people would naturally stop paying for this and ticket sales would consequently go down as people would simply enjoy the artwork from their screens at home.

In May 2011, Yale University took the bold decision to make their digitized public domain collections freely available at the highest possible resolutions, including for commercial use. This action is now driving change across museums. As Merete says:

Sharing is caring – when cultural heritage is openly and freely accessible, everyone has a chance to use it, engage with it. It becomes relevant, a part of people’s lives. It creates a sense of shared ownership that makes us care

What we are seeing today, is that the more visible and prominent museums are online, the more interesting they get. In other words: Increased sharing on their web sites, increases the amount of visitors to the museums.

Sharing is caring for higher education

Similar to museums, higher education institutions have also traditionally acted as gatekeepers of information and restricted access to their research. Schools around the world are now really feeling the impact of the Web as learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom.

On a broad scale, the Digital Humanities Manifesto aims to rethink higher education. Rather than academic research as an individual elitist practice, the Manifesto suggests a collective and iterative process in a global network where knowledge is shared.

On a more practical level, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced MITx, a new MIT plan to distribute additional online courses next fall. The intent is to share with others and have these courses available for students at other universities. This certainly has the potential for another university to add to its course offerings in areas that it does not have the capacity to teach itself.

Taking it one step further is the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. Courses are available to instructors outside Carnegie Mellon itself and there is an opportunity for instructors outside Carnegie to recommend and build courses to include in the program.

Sharing is caring for you

Sharing as a trend goes far beyond museums and higher education. Think of sharing as the thing that naturally succeeds open. Sharing means that other people can contribute.

Content marketing is essentially about sharing your content and making it available to others. One such example is Red Bull, who wants to share the content on the athletes, teams and sports they sponsor on their websites. This way they gain traffic while indirectly branding their company and their products. To me, their sharing strategy is the best answer so far to why Red Bull has an amazing 26+ million fans on Facebook.

Another example that shows that sharing is caring is how shipping giant Maersk Line uses social media to interact with customers. They use an innovative mix of Facebook, Twitter, video and more to add personality to their brand and make them seem more approachable as a company. Really what they are doing is sharing the voice of the organisation with the rest of the world and including key information and photos in the mix.

What could you share?

Learn more

Caring is not be in the normal business vocabulary, but the links below shows examples of how it might allow us to step outside our normal organizational constructs and think bigger thoughts.

• Sharing is caring for your intranet by Guy Van Leemput
• Altimeter and the Value of Open Research, where Mark Greenfield who is Director of Web Services at University at Buffalo talks about how Altimeter is a different type of analyst firm
• The Brooklyn Museum Collection API is a set of services that you can use to display Brooklyn Museum collection images and data in your own applications.
• Set it free to create more value: Merete’s talk at the J. Boye Aarhus 11 conference
• Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (PDF)
• Mashable: Marketers who share content drive traffic, gain customers
• The 2011 conference on sharing is caring, including videos from the conference talks
• Open access and mobile strategies in large US museums: Report from a research visit by Merete Sanderhoff, October 2011
• Smithsonian’s Web and New Media strategy process: References and Quotes regarding Public Domain and Image Sales and Licensing Activities in Museums

You can also hear more about sharing is caring at the J. Boye Philadelphia 12 conference for web & intranet professionals on May 8 – 10, where it is a main theme for the conference, including for the opening keynote by Janus Boye.

Thanks goes to Bob Johnson, Mark Greenfield, Merete Sanderhoff and Michael Edson for valuable input.

As a buyer it can be confusing and difficult to stay updated on the rapid market developments, so I made a slide showing who the big vendors were in 2007 and what the picture looks like today for a recent J. Boye group meeting.

Large, global and complex organisations tend to gravitate towards the big vendors. As one of our members put it:

Elephants buy from elephants

The elephants: The big CMS vendors in 2007 and 2012. Click for a larger version

Consolidation has only happened to the extent that vendors have bought other vendors. With just a few exceptions all the products have been kept alive, so today several of the above have more than one Web CMS as a part of their offering.

Finally, a look at the big vendor websites won’t get you far in terms of figuring out more about their CMS offerings. They may be big vendors, but they also offer many other solutions and CMS is apparently not on top of their list. Here’s the CMS products from each:

• Adobe: CQ5 (I gave up looking for it on adobe.com and instead turned to day.com, which is the CMS vendor they acquired in 2010)
• Autonomy: TeamSite (which came via the Interwoven acquisition in 2009 and Autonomy is now actually owned by HP)
• EMC: Documentum (which they acquired in 2003)
• IBM: Web Content Manager (which belongs to the Lotus family in IBM software)
• Microsoft: SharePoint
• Open Text: Web Experience Management (which came via the Vignette acquisition in 2009)
• Oracle: WebCenter Sites (formerly known as FatWire which they acquired in 2011)

Learn more

Read about who’s big in the European CMS marketplace.

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CMS is also a hot topic on the web content management conference track at J. Boye Philadelphia 12 on May 10.

I spoke to Jill Sandström and Michael Rosager from Digital Communications in Nordea. They told me that more than 30,000 Nordea employees from 13 countries have access to People Book.

Nordea’s new People Book: the highlights

The screenshot illustrates a few of the great features that the new People Book offers:

• “What you can ask me”: allows employees to indicate, using keywords, in which areas they are knowledgeable and are willing to help their colleagues.
• Experience and competences: Many people directories offer some possibility for employees to list these, but the Nordea functionality is particularly well-structured and detailed. People can list the projects that they have worked on, their former jobs, skills such as languages as well as more personal interests.
• Nickname: Providing a nickname and making it searchable is a popular feature in certain countries such as Finland
• Alternative contact: Urgent question but your regular contact person is not available? Look up the alternative contact on the profile page!
• Direct access to the person’s job description
• Direct access to the organizational structure, with a clear view of an employee’s colleagues and reporting line all the way up to the CEO

Employees from across the organization are enthusiastic:

People Book is by far the number 1 reason for me to use the intranet!

The new People Book and the integration with Communicator work very well; I use it a lot!

People Book has helped me as a new employee to find colleagues with the right expertise.

Strong integration with search and office tools

Another key strength of the Nordea People Book is that it is not a stand-alone application, but is very smoothly integrated with other office productivity tools:

• The intranet search engine has a specific ‘people search’ option, and has been fine-tuned to handle the keywords from the “What you can ask me” feature with the appropriate importance. It also allows you to narrow down your search results further, for instance by country if you are looking for a person from a particular country office. The screenshot below shows you how it works.

• The people book is also nicely integrated with Microsoft Communicator, for instance by showing the presence button (green, yellow, red, do not disturb, …) next to the person’s name and by adding a ‘click to chat’ link.

Behind the scenes

The success of Nordea’s People Book hinges on solid, user-friendly processes and a strong technology foundation. The process for employees is quite straightforward: Most fields on their profile page, such as the “What you can ask me” or the interests field, are just plain text fields. Managers have a follow-up link on their profile page, allowing them to easily visualize who in their team has filled out the optional fields.

The profile pages and the edit forms are presented in a simple, user-friendly layout built in BEA WebLogic Portal. Autonomy’s IDOL search technology is used for indexing and has been fine-tuned to deliver quality search results.

Why is finding people so important on the intranet?

A good people directory provides a lot more value to the organization than just allowing people to find telephone numbers. Companies are increasingly using tools like these to discover talent across the organization, to stimulate efficient collaboration and to win more business by allowing project teams to find answers quickly.

Intranets come in many different shapes and flavours, but there is one feature that employees always mention as their primary reason to use the intranet: finding colleagues. This is why it is so important for organizations to focus on the quality of their people directory; intranet managers must make sure that employees can perform this top task efficiently and successfully.

Next steps for Nordea

From my experience, the Nordea People Book is best-in-class, making it difficult to suggest further improvements.

One area where some companies have gone further is in formalizing the skills management. The current free-format approach can be complemented with an HR-provided component, a taxonomy of skills, different levels (basic, professional, expert) and endorsement from colleagues.

Next steps for your intranet

• Learn from the best: Not yet registered for the intranet conference track at J. Boye Philadelphia 12? Then secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: People directories are often discussed – and compared! – in our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America. Not yet a group member? Find out which one is right for you.
• How does your intranet measure up? We’ll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!