A few days ago I was asked to provided some input on how to approach the set up of an intranet portal.
The Intranet portal already exists but the underlying technology is going to be upgraded. Currently it is Sharepoint 2003 and it is going to be MOSS 2007. Although this upgrade seems rather technical, it is not. Sharepoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 are so far apart that a re-implementation is the most honest approach. Given that internal IT projects for an IT company traditionally lack sufficient funding, this is going to be a challenge. Keeping close to the templates that MOSS offers is a way to deal with this money issue.
So, in its most simple form, what needs to be done is to decide which out-of-the-box template will be used and which content needs to be moved into the new templates. Given the state of the as-is, this is not the way to go. Going back to the drawing board is the only option. This was an unstructured discussion broke loose between people that ment well but don’t deal with the problems of unstructured content on a daily basis. My manager called for a break and that’s where I came in and decided to put down my thoughts on paper.
Even though this is Intranet, even though the target audience is known, still we need to answer the first and foremost question: WHY?
Why do we need this portal? Just because the technology is offered is not good enough. Like in the real world: you need a business case! In this case there is no commercial interest. So, dig for the non-commercial reasons that makes you say: that is why we need to use this facility. Look for things that should be done but that are not facilitated. Candidates are: knowledge sharing, (management) news channel, extended facebook including current assignments, fixed organization information, supply and demand.
There are also many other ‘sites’ that are available. For projects, for training, from our mother company, from other clusters in our own organisation including HR, fleet management and finance. Overlap with them is not an option. Maybe some effort is needed to extend those but doing them all over again is not the way to go. Alternatively you could think of incorporating them.
So, let’s assume the decision is made: we need one. The arguments for that descision also give you a clue on what content is needed. The easy part is creating this content and making it available.
The hard part is keeping is it current and managing the beast. Let’s address each seperately.
Keeping information current is a generic challenge captured in the beautiful words Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). In it’s purest form you create content ánd tag it with a valid-from and valid-until dates ánd use workflow to either extend the valid-until date just in time or dispose the content at all. Does anyone believe that a skill matrix with a last midification in November 2006 is stil releavant content? No, it’s polution! ILM should also enable workflows that actively prompt people to review their content a pre-defined intervals. And, have someone approving all this.
The question is not: do we need this? The question is: what becomes of our portal if we don’t and can we live with that. If the answer is yes, you’ve missed the boat from an ECM perspective. And to make it easy to answer this: just look at the as-is and you probably know enough.
The other part is managing the beast. MOSS is not a solution. It’s a toolbox. In a no-budget scenario, keep to what comes out-of-the-box in a ‘MOSS as a service’ scenario and only add some extra’s that will benefit all. An example of the latter is blog summary page that shows e.g. 10 blog posts but for each just an abstract of 250 characters followed by a ‘more’ link.
Even in the scenario of Moss as a service, someone is busy helping contributers with permissions, limitations, tip & tricks. Since permissions are inherited by the site agglomerate (MOSS is more or less a collection of sub-sites that each have a dedicated role) you have too many people with too much permissions at too much sites. With a trusted audience and limited exposure risks, this is still preferred over setting the right permissions for the right people at the right pieces. Remember: we’re in a no-budget scenario.
Normally you should never look at the tool before you know what you want. In this scenario, I considder it a valid approach. What does MOSS as a service offer out of the box? In a nutshell it are these site templates:
- Team Site: A site for teams to quickly organize, author, and share information. It provides a document library, and lists for managing announcements, calendar items, tasks, and discussions.
- Documet Workspace: A site for colleagues to work together on a document. It provides a document library for storing the primary document and supporting files, a tasks list for assigning to-do items, and a links list for resources related to the document.
- Wiki: A site for a community to brainstorm and share ideas. It provides Web pages that can be quickly edited to record information and then linked together through keywords.
- Blog: A site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise that site visitors can comment on.
- Basic Meeting: A site to plan, organize, and capture the results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing the agenda, meeting attendees, and documents.
- Decision Meeting: A site for meetings that track status or make decisions. It provides lists for creating tasks, storing documents, and recording decisions.
- Social Meeting: A site to plan social occasions. It provides lists for tracking attendees, providing directions, and storing pictures of the event.
- Multipage Meeting: A site to plan, organize, and capture the results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing the agenda and meeting attendees in addition to two blank pages for you to customize based on your requirements.
- News Site: A site for publishing news articles and links to news articles. It includes a sample news page and an archive for storing older news items.
So, on top of the ‘why’ question and based upon theses discriptions, you can ask yourself questions like: do we want to facilitate meetings? If so, in which form? Do we want to faciliteit collaboration? If so, in which form?
Is there any thing else that is important? Yes. Because this is a known target audience, too easily it is assumed that the demand is known. Even here I urge to discover the buy-in from them. They’ll always look from a ‘what’s in it for me’ angle.
Alltogether enough food for thought.
