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.

If you are working with CMS as a big part of your job, then consider joining our CMS Expert groups. CMS and all the related challenges is also a regular topic in many other J. Boye groups for web & intranet professionals.

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

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.

Learn more

• Become a group member: 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? Get an intranet benchmark!
• Join us at a J. Boye conference in 2012: Our next conference will take place in Philadelphia from 8 to 10 May 2012. There will be a full-day intranet conference track and another SharePoint conference track.

One of the major benefits is that responsive web design moves the focus away from technology and onto making a more useful site for the users. In a nutshell, responsive web design adapts the content and design of the website to any device, regardless of whether it is a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone.

This means Jyske Bank no longer needs to create a specific mobile-friendly website or any other different edition for other devices. Just one website and it adapts to everything. This fits well with the underlying motto that the Jyske Bank web team posted on the wall and used for this massive 2011 project:

Build the site you can manage!

I had a conversation with their user experience designer Claus Stadel Petersen and online strategist Gorm Ruge to learn more and take a look behind the scenes.

From idea to reality

The initial driver for the Jyske Bank website re-launch was the introduction of a new technical platform. As in other organisations, the communication team wanted to use this as an opportunity to update content and improve the interface.

The old web design: How the Jyske Bank website used to look

At Jyske Bank, they also took a closer look at the growth in website traffic coming from mobile devices. Despite having no dedicated mobile website and a desktop site that did not work well on mobile devices, traffic coming from mobile devices was still growing rapidly. The Jyske Bank team considering developing dedicated mobile sites.

The downside to a bigger and better mobile site is additional maintenance and potential disappointment among customers, which would only get a watered down version of the desktop site. Jyske Bank decided this was not good enough and started looking for a better way.

When they heard about responsive web design in the spring of 2011, they immediately liked the idea. A decision was made to opt for this and the actual development work started right away.

After the summer holidays the initial pages using responsive web design went live starting with the home banking info pages, contact pages and search. More content areas were subsequently launched iteratively. The prominent frontpage came in early December and the missing pieces are being rolled out in the coming months.

According to the team at Jyske Bank, it is difficult to get an estimate on the additional upfront design and development costs that come with responsive web design. It might be up to 20% more expensive due to the additional time required for cascading style sheets and markup, but in their view it makes good sense in the longer term where time and money is saved by not having to crank out additional templates for each device.

From “mobile-first” to “users-first”

During the redesign project, Jyske Bank did several rounds of usability testing. As a part of the testing, they asked the participants to solve top tasks such as currency exchange calculations and finding out when a local branch closes on Tuesdays.

The results from the testing were helpful in the process of further improving the new interface. Based on this, statistics on media consumption and own experiences all acted as a useful reminder to follow the “users-first mantra” and provided a better understanding of when customers use which device, eg. likely to be a desktop when in the office and a mobile device when sitting in the couch at home.

Building the responsive interface

The actual coding of the new responsive website, was done by in-house resources, with external CSS coding help from Aarhus-based design agency Designit.

Behind the new site are drawings based on 3-column wireframes. These were further developed into a 12 column design, eg. divided into 3 x 4 or 8 + 4 depending on the layout of the page. The entire screen for a desktop is assumed to be 970 pixels or more and Jyske Bank has then defined rules for what happens on small screens; typically moving right hand interface elements further down.

3 lessons learned about responsive web design

The first lesson learned is that there is a mental barrier; a “desktop mindset” that needs to be changed. This applies to everything, including input fields, which need to be able to fit on smaller screens. The take away is that you always need to remember that all interface elements need to work across devices.

Secondly, set aside plenty of time for testing; not only in different desktop browsers, but also on different devices. Jyske Bank ran into specific technology issues with Android-devices that got fixed shortly after launch.

Finally, remember that the concept of responsive web design is still new. For Jyske Bank specifically as an early adopter, this meant that they had to write more code as very few responsive design themes or open source packages existed that Jyske Bank could leverage.

Learn more

User experience expert Ethan Marcotte coined the term responsive design and started it all with his article and later expanded his thinking with a book. For more reading on the topic, see this article from Smashing Magazine: Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It

Boston Globe was one of the first organisations to embrace responsive web design in September 2011 and their case has been widely documented, including on webmonkey: The Boston Globe Embraces Responsive Design. Since then many other organisations have decided to go in this direction, including Red Bull starting with their Red Bull Music Academy.

Jyske Bank is a member of the J. Boye groups for web & intranet professionals. If you want to meet peers and share your own stories, see if we have a group for you.

This is an unusual story for a business-to-business (B2B) giant, so I had a conversation with Mette Hermund Kildahl, Head of Channel Management and Head of Social Media Jonathan Wichmann at Maersk Line to better understand their social media approach and objectives.

Social media in a B2B context

According to Mette, Maersk Line have been working on creating effective web-based self-service solutions for the past decade. This has many advantages, but less interaction with customers can also create an unwanted distance to them. As Mette puts it:

Approachability and personality are our social media keywords. While we are a B2B company, our customers are people who just like in B2C also would like to interact with us.

Using social media combined with an improved website, Maersk Line wants to make themselves more available to customers and also make it easier for customers to find answers to their questions, while adding some personality to the brand.

To Maersk Line social media at the moment mostly means Facebook and Twitter. The two platforms are used on a daily basis to share stories, promote the website and measure the pulse of customers.

Maersk Line on Facebook

The welcome banner when you first visit the popular Maersk Line page on Facebook

During the past couple of years, Maersk Line has been following the social media phenomenon and mostly listening to the conversation. While most companies turn to external agencies when they feel ready to get started, Maersk Line instead decided to turn to an internal resource in communication with social media experience from a past job. This meant that they could get started more quickly and it was easier to ensure business relevance from the onset. Also, they did not have to do an agency brief on the tone of voice, culture and social media objectives.

If you take a look at the Facebook page for the container shipping company, you’ll find this interesting introduction to how they want to engage and build relationships with customers using social media:

We shouldn’t rule anything out, e.g. co-creating our next big product with our customers through social media platforms such as Facebook

Maersk Line decided from the beginning that the main Facebook Page should not be used for customer service, such as questions or complaints. This should instead be handled either on local Pages such as Maersk Line Belgium’s Facebook Page or using Live Help or FAQ on www.maerskline.com.

The Maersk Line Facebook Page

Among some of the key elements you can find on the Maersk Line page today on Facebook are:

• explore all sides of Maersk Line with a collection of Instagram pictures. One of the purposes of this is to begin to build an archive of Maersk containers seen around the world and tagged by friends using their smartphone
• voices of Maersk Line is an integration with Twitter, where you can read tweets from different employees in roles such as the Captain of Adrian Maersk, the Head of Corporate Responsibility and a Graduate.
• questions, where customers are polled on container shipping questions such as this one: “Do you think shippers and consignees can help each other through discussion fora the same way customers do on e.g. Skype?”
• 5 house rules, e.g. stating that the Facebook page is not the right place for job applications and, that no questions about shipments and nothing offensive should be posted.

As you might have noticed by now, another unusual aspect of this approach to Facebook, is that it is very light on marketing and campaigns. The Facebook activities are based in the Communication department and this might be one of the key B2B differentiators.

New Facebook status updates are posted on a daily basis, also on weekends, with stories ranging from strike in Nigeria, slow steaming, substituting biofuel for bunker fuel, photos from the world of shipping and promoting new website updates. Here’s one of the more popular recent status updates:

The only thing that Maersk Line has used external help for is getting the Facebook tabs programmed. The cost for coding this was very minimal and unlike usual campaign costs, the Facebook tabs are free to maintain and should be useful for years to come.

What Maersk Line has learned so far

In my conversation with Mette and Jonathan, they highlighted that they have both been positively surprised by the huge interest in the company on Facebook. It takes time and resources to build out the Facebook page and regularly update it, but it also gives them a new and direct channel to get instant feedback.

Similar to other communication activities, it is hard to exactly quantify and  measure the business value of a popular Facebook page like this, but such a massive exposure should lead to at least some new business opportunities.

It has been surprisingly easy to get colleagues started on Twitter, so that they can be heard on the Facebook page using the smart Twitter integration. Even senior management has joined the Twitter panel!

The Maersk Line web and social media universe

If you look across social media, there are many different Maersk sites out there. Here are the 6 official ones used actively at the moment by Maersk Line:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Tumblr
• LinkedIn
• Google+

Besides the popular social media activities, Maersk Line also has a beta version of their new website, where you can take a closer look at some of the new website improvements. Today website traffic only flows in one direction from Facebook to the website, but that might change in the future.

Finally, if you want to take a look at some other cool web activities coming out of Maersk, visit the Maersk Fleet site which uses HTML5, dynamic scaling and more to create a visual, engaging rich media experience of the magnitude and whereabouts of Maersk’s fleet.

Learn more about social media

You can learn more about social media and share your own stories, in one of the J. Boye groups for social media professionals in Europe and North America.

At the next J. Boye conference in Philadelphia in May, you can also attend a dedicated social media conference track.

With all the valuable input and learnings we get from the J. Boye group meetings and our wider community, we want to use this opportunity to be open about our own web activities and highlight some of what we learned in 2011.

New and better conference website

Probably the most visible progress we made happened in August, when we finally launched the redesigned Aarhus 11 conference website. Among the notable changes were:

• Improved visual identity to support the conference brand
• Clear call-to-action
• Better program and speaker pages
• Fat footer

The project was a joint effort with our Aarhus friends at Klean and ME! ME! ME!. We’ve since re-used the interface for the Philadelphia 12 conference website and the conference websites are all powered by WordPress.

Better website texts

Early 2011 we worked with David Lalley from Worddesign. David helped us get a better understanding of our message and highlighted the many areas we simply did not describe and communicate clearly enough. We worked through how to better communicate our vision for web and intranet professionals. David did an excellent job and it was quite an eye opener to see the company and the website through external lenses. One of the tangible results of this work was clearer copy on the website and less unclear or obsolete content.

As happens over time for small and large organisations alike, we had started using different terms for our few products, eg. “community”, “network” and “groups” to describe one and the same thing.  This creates confusion and lack of clarity. According to David and other friends, our texts also had quite an “insider feeling” making it hard for people new to J. Boye to figure out what actually we have to offer.

J. Boye blog

During the year we shared a number of fascinating stories where digital professionals shared the full story about the successes and challenges with recent projects including:

• Darden Restaurants: CMS selection in a large enterprise
• Mercer maps out career paths for knowledge management professionals
• Swarovski hosts treasure hunt using smartphones
• UPM explores the one page website

The blog also featured several popular guest postings, eg. on Google+ and we wrote our own postings on relevant digital topics. The total number of page views on the many blog postings grew some 12% during 2011.

Online analytics

Since 2008 we’ve known that a website without statistics is just a hobby, but it remains difficult for us to prioritize and find the time to actively use our website statistics. While we continue to use Google Analytics and have easy access to many useful numbers and reports, we don’t systematically use the valuable data.

In 2010 traffic to jboye.com was up 30% compared to 2009 and in 2011 this trend continued with a 24% growth in visitor traffic. The bounce rate unfortunately continued to grow from 71% to 73%.

SEO

Compared to past years we did more SEO work in 201. Still much less than intended. Search traffic was up almost 30%, so the potential remains high.

Besides the different ways to spell the company name, popular search terms were “mobile CMS”, “SharePoint pricing”, “umbraco vs. sitecore” and “intranet trends”.

Mobile

Unfortunately we did not manage to make much progress when it comes to mobile. Traffic from mobile devices is now at 4% of total traffic and was up 50% compared to last year. Some of this is probably coming from iPads, iPhones and Android devices internally on the J. Boye team.

Most of the year we used a simple mobile-friendly template for jboye.com. Based on user feedback, we disabled this at the end of the year, so that mobile visitors now just get the same website as anyone else. The websites, in particular conference sites, are quite heavy on smaller screens, so we need to do better.

Social media

With Facebook we’ve taken a few steps back and forth. In 2010 we decided to close our group and spent a couple of months figuring out how best to use the platform. Based on recommendations from several members, we decided to experiment and launch a J. Boye Page on Facebook in April. The page has since accumulated 117 likes, which might not be very impressive, but has certainly given us useful insights into how Facebook works from a business perspective. Traffic from Facebook is up 77%, but still less than half of what LinkedIn sends us.

LinkedIn continued to become more and more important for us. As a source of traffic, the popular networking site sent us 41% more visitors. Also the J. Boye LinkedIn group grew from 662 to 1121 members and remained a good forum for group members to ask questions and get input and answers.

Twitter traffic was also up, although with only 17%. Still, Twitter sends us more traffic than LinkedIn and the @jboye account ended the year with 1,360 followers up from 781 at the beginning of the year.

A few of us signed onto Google+, but as a company we’ve done nothing noteworthy yet, except being curious and trying to understand where the rapidly growing network is heading.

What’s next?

High on the 2012 wishlist are better credit card payments, better usage of visual communication including video and responsive web design. Hopefully we’ll make progress with our content, SEO and analytics.

Where do you think we should focus our limited efforts? Please feel free to leave a comment and share your ideas for 2012.

Learn more

• Read our past online annual reports: J. Boye online in 2010, J. Boye online in 2009 and J. Boye blogging in 2008
• Become a group member: Meet with others and get the full story behind the scenes in our many J. Boye groups across Europe and North America. Not yet a group member? Find out which one is right for you.

Danish dairy company Arla Foods, took the first small but important step in the direction of social, when they introduced a simple thumbs up or down rating feature on internal news. According to intranet webmaster at Arla, Martin Risgaard:

This has been quite a significant change to internal communication. While people might not talk much about internal news, the success we have had with this proves their willingness to engage with the messages we communicate internally

The idea originated from intranet surveys where many Arla employees asked for commenting or like functionality on intranet news stories. In addition, the senior management team was pushing for more vibrant internal communication based on openness and honesty. This created the momentum that enabled the intranet team to add this small and cheap, but very visible feature to the intranet.

As you can see from the above intranet story, this single story so far has 42 thumbs up. Even more impressive, Arla has had a total of 1,600 thumbs up or down indications only 4 weeks after using this on about 20 stories in total. According to Martin, the most popular stories are the ones in which a person expresses plans or opinions. No surprise, since that calls for an opinion whereas a business success stories easily becomes a bit generic. You need to have a bit of “edge” in order to prompt people to have an opinion.

Next step for the Arla intranet is to find new ways of encouraging people to participate even more in the debate.

Start small with your social intranet

Many other J. Boye group members are currently at some stage of implementing one or more social intranet features, such as commenting, discussion forums or microblogging.

It’s a good strategy to start small with a simple but highly visible feature such as the Facebook-style thumbs of Arla. This will pave the way for additional, more complex features to be added successfully later.

A social intranet can also be used to discover talent within your organisation as explained by Guy van Leemput in his posting on 5 intranet trends for 2011. 

Learn more

Arla is a member of the J. Boye community for web & intranet professionals. You can join as well and learn from experienced peers in a confidential setting.

• Become a group member: Social intranets is a regular theme in our many J. Boye 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? Get an intranet benchmark!
• Join us at a J. Boye conference in 2012: Our next conference will take place in Philadelphia from 8 to 10 May 2012. There will be a full-day intranet conference track and another SharePoint conference track.

10.  Overuse of capital letters and punctuation in the subject line. Respect your readers. Don’t bludgeon them with an overly anxious call to action punctuated withgratuitous question marks and exclamation points.  What is urgent to you, might not be urgent to others.

9.  Pictures that distract attention. We say that a picture is worth 1000 words, but words are worth 1000 pictures.  Too often a picture is the first part of the email, and it doesn’t render correctly, so the receiver just deletes the email. Be sure to send a test message to yourself and see how the email renders both with and without pictures.  Be sure that your message can work even if the picture is not included.

8. Text that is too long or too short. Making effective newsletters is an art. It takes practice and testing.  The proper length can depend upon the topic and the audience.  An article or story that is too short without enough content to provide value is not worth reading.  Sometimes you can make a short teaser with a link to a longer discussion on your website. By the same token, avoid long emails. Break up a long topic into 2 or 3 emails on related themes.  A general rule is to keep your message to one page when printed–including pictures.

7. The broken record. Saying your message consistently is not the same thing as saying it over in the same message.  Make your point clearly and succinctly once in the message, ideally at the beginning.  Ensure that your message is consistent in subsequent newsletters.

6. Indiscriminate links. The art of a good email newsletter is to show restraint.  Avoid the trap of making every offer under the sun to your customer.  Instead focus on one topic and one link for the newsletter.

5.  Surprises: In life we like surprises, but not necessarily in the email newsletter.  Be sure to discuss the topic named in the subject line, not something else.

4. Overly fancy design: The principles of “less is more” and “keep-it-simple” hold true.  Today’s newsletter tools offer hundreds of templates with many designs, layouts, graphics and so on.  Be critical. Does the design improve the offer and quality of the message? When in doubt, leave it out.

3. Too many topics in a single newsletter.  A good email newsletter has just a single topic, no more. It’s good that you have a lot of topics.  It means you can make more newsletters in future!

2. Boring subject line. If you can’t be bothered to make an interesting subject line, why should the recipient read the email?

1.  Unknown sender, The recipient of the mail wants to know who is communicating.  Have a real person at the other end of the newsletter. If you can make your newsletter and email communication personal to the recipient, so much the better.

Learn more

Roslyn Layton has contributed to several J. Boye group meetings with expert presentations on digital marketing. You can find some of her talks on Roslyn’s Slideshare profile.

You can subscribe to the monthly J. Boye newsletter using the below form on the right hand side.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it

Peter Drucker‘s well-known words of wisdom certainly apply to intranets. Analytics tools should be part of the answer, and are being increasingly adopted to measure various aspects of intranet usage.

From my contacts with many intranet managers through the wider J. Boye community, three vendors stand out from the pack: Adobe, Google and WebTrends.

• Adobe bought analytics vendor Omniture back in 2009. Their SiteCatalyst product is especially popular among online marketeers and e-commerce managers. Its main target audience is clearly on the web, but the product can also be used to analyze intranet traffic.
• Google has both Urchin and Analytics which are very similar in functionality. The advantage of Urchin which makes it well-suited for intranet is that it can be installed on-premise, behind the firewall, and does not require any access to the public internet. In addition, all analytics data is stored in-house, under the organization’s full control.
• WebTrends is quite popular among Microsoft SharePoint users. SharePoint has some very basic analytics built in, but it’s so basic that many companies are looking for more. WebTrends Analytics is very feature-rich and integrates well with SharePoint 2010, so this is becoming an increasingly popular combination.

Among the many open source options, Piwik seems to come up most often for intranets.

Which tool do you use for your intranet?

Learn more

• Become a group member: Intranet metrics, KPIs and analytics tools are often discussed in our many J. Boye 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? Get an intranet benchmark!
• Join us at a J. Boye conference in 2012: Our next conference will take place in Philadelphia from 8 to 10 May 2012. There will be a full-day intranet conference track and another SharePoint conference track.

At first glance, using a single CMS is an appealing way to consolidate, control costs and re-use investments. In practice, more analysis is required to decide if this is indeed the best option.

Compare your requirements

It is sometimes possible to implement a single CMS for both the internal and external worlds, but in most cases the requirements are quite different and there is no single product that can match them sufficiently. Another element to consider is company size. In a small company, consolidating around one tool often makes sense, but the larger the enterprise, the greater the case for different solutions.

To find out what is best for you, you can use an evaluation methodology that consists of comparing requirements for the website and the intranet in a number of functional areas that are important to your organization. This methodology is illustrated in the figure below (with fictitious data, for illustration purposes only):

Level of complexity of functional requirements for website and intranet

The graph shows:

• On the horizontal axis: The most important areas of functional requirements. The graph above illustrates six commonly found areas, but in a realistic case you will identify 10 to 15 different domains.
• On the vertical axis: The level of complexity that is required for each of these functional areas, for the website (illustrated in red) and for the intranet (illustrated in blue). Complexity is ranked on a scale from 1 (simple) to 5 (complex). ‘Simple’ means that only the basic level of functionality is required for this area. ‘Complex’ means that the requirements are sophisticated and feature-rich.

Interpretation of the graph: If the two lines (the blue intranet line and the red website line) are generally close together or overlap, then requirements are similar in nature and a single CMS can be envisaged. If the two lines are far apart for most of the requirements, as is the case in this fictitious example, then this is a strong indicator that a single CMS product is unlikely to be a good fit.

Example: content creation and editing

This is a typical example of a functional area where requirements are often very different between the intranet and the website, especially in large, complex organizations. The table below illustrates how requirements can differ in terms of number of users, required user interface and the use of templates:

Learn more

Some additional thoughts and insights from a few well-respected industry experts:

• James Robertson from Step Two Designs makes a strong case for focusing on the user requirements
• Martin White from Intranet Focus blogs about some additional issues to consider when selecting a CMS for your intranet

Still not sure how to approach your CMS selection project? You can join one of the many J. Boye groups across Europe and North America, where you can meet colleagues from other organizations who have gone through the same process. Or ask J. Boye for advice: CMS selection for websites and intranets is an area where we have provided many organizations with professional advice.

Clearly, for many of them mobile is no longer just a nice-to-have add-on. It is now part of the core business, and has become an essential delivery channel with its own characteristics and opportunities.

NOS leads the way in mobile delivery

As a public broadcaster, NOS has a clear mission towards its audience: to be the primary source of information, news, sports and events for Dutch citizens. Their focus is no longer just on ‘traditional’ radio and TV broadcasting, but increasingly on delivery through other platforms – web, smartphones and tablets.

James talked about the following examples:

• Generic mobile website m.nos.nl bringing news to any mobile phone
• Apps for major sports events, such as the Tour de France and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, with live updates of results and live video
• A teletext app, with – on purpose! – the same archaic look and feel as the teletext pages on TV, to ensure consistency between the various delivery platforms
• User-generated content, with possibility to upload pictures and video via NOS Eyewitness
  
• Gamification: news quiz and social apps, to be used on a second screen in parallel with the traditional TV broadcast.

The next level: Multi-screen strategies

The next step for NOS is to think about more innovative multi-screen strategies. It is no longer enough to design mobile applications, it is also important to think about how they are interconnected with other digital platforms and form factors. Customers are constantly switching between devices and expect user interface, content and overall experience to be seamless.

In his presentation, James referred to some great thought-provoking work done by German design consultancy Precious. They have come up with a categorization of “ecosystems” for TV, PC, tablet and smartphone screens, and identified 6 different usage patterns.

The future: build on the strengths of each platform

The way forward, in the eyes of James and shared by many others at the conference, is to overcome the roadblocks to mobile adoption and to build on the strengths of each platform (smartphone, tablet, laptop, TV screen). Those roadblocks include:

• Data cost: In Europe, cross-border data roaming charges are still a major concern, despite action being undertaken by the European Commission
  
• Cost of development for multiple screen sizes and native smartphone OS’s. Many organizations are revisiting development of native apps in favour of HTML5-powered mobile sites and/or ‘responsive design’ technology

Ultimately there should be room for all platforms, because each has its own very specific advantages and shortcomings. For mobile devices, the advantages lie in the added capabilities of geo-location awareness and user-generated content, anytime, anywhere. NOS has very intelligently added “any screen” to the equation!

Learn more

• Become a group member: Case studies about mobile projects are regularly presented and discussed at our many J. Boye groups across Europe and North America. Not yet a group member? Find out which one is right for you.
• Join us at a J. Boye conference in 2012: Our next conference will take place in Philadelphia from 8 to 10 May 2012. There will be a full-day conference track dedicated to ‘going mobile’. Want to share your mobile project? We welcome good speakers with a compelling story!