Page 36 – Content Formula

Intranet big bang launches fail to satisfy

Posted on 10 June 201516 November 2023 by Hannah Barltrop

Its common to promise a new world when scoping the requirements for a new intranet. At the early stage, youre certain that the new platform with a new intranet user experience (UX) will deliver measurable business benefits in comparison to the old, clunky intranet.

Part of your role is to engage stakeholders, super-users, champions, and site / content owners in order to involve them in the redesign project, and in any content migration work. So you share the vision of the new world and persuade people that investment in the new system is an investment in their real work.

As the project gets underway, resources are tight but youre committed and you double your efforts as if the Emperor is about to personally visit your half-constructed Death Star.

Assuming you meet all the requirements (and scope creep is a constant threat), its a massive effort launch is your goal and its a relief to reach that goal. Buy the project team a round of drinks / boxes of cookies and actually get nine hours of sleep tonight.

But is launch so exciting for end-users, the colleagues the new intranet is supposed to serve?

The big bang

If youre changing or upgrading platforms then 99% of the time youll end up doing a big bang launch. The new system has so many new features (and hopefully, benefits) so the change will be so obvious to everyone. Lets celebrate!

It can be tempting to correlate the massive effort weve invested against the supposed benefits weve worked so hard, the thing must be good!

With the right user research and design testing (UX), you might indeed have the evidence to show that the new intranet more effectively supports people and their work.

But really, because levels of satisfaction, enthusiasm, even happiness, tend to return to their original average, in a matter of weeks or months your intranet will no longer be the new thing and no longer show increased usage stats. Basically, in a short while, people will forget just how bad the old intranet was, and no longer see the new intranet as a real improvement.

(And heres a thought; when do you turn the old intranet off? When content migration is complete? What if migration staggers on for seven months?)

Metrics might save you from negative judgements from your stakeholders. While employee satisfaction levels might fall over time, you might be able to prove that more tasks are being completed online than ever before, et cetera.

Yet, people will still report that the intranet doesnt quite meet their expectations; so what can be done?

The incremental

Big bang launches can be exciting, but can also be overwhelming for people who just want to get on with their work and can no longer find the expense system or the proposal writing template.

Engagement activities, training, and time is needed in order to help everyone make best use of the new features and ways of working. Without this additional soft work (as opposed to all the IT work), people will revert to email and their C-drives instead of using the social and collaborative features of the new intranet.

The incremental improvement approach is all about drip-feeding new features to end-users and supporting their adoption. Instead of the intranet being an IT project, its an on-going business improvement programme, supported by L&D, IT, HR, Comms, the executive sponsor and the Steering Committee.

You dont even have to start with a massive design overhaul or a platform upgrade you can improve things from today.

Through the year, regularly, you might turn on new features that the platform offers, meaning that the intranet literally does more for people. The latest incarnation of SharePoint comes with all sorts of tools and functionalities that you might want to switch on gradually. This reduces how overwhelmed people might be with new features and new choices if you launch with every feature turned on.

Soon after, you might redesign the basic page layouts / page templates so that information is easier to read and ancillary reference materials (links, documents) are closer to hand.

Later, after copious user research, you will need to improve the main navigation menu, to better meet peoples expectations.

Many improvements will need research, so youre making evidence based decisions, and many will need accompanying soft work, such as contributor meetings and training. Some improvements wont need any technical changes at all such as reaffirming your intranet governance and engaging local department champions.

The point is that the effort (as shown in the sketch) is sustained over time. This is about intranet leadership not merely intranet management. Your sustained effort (and the resources that must support it) demonstrates your organisations commitment to its people and their work. And should create greater satisfaction.

An intranet governance checklist

Posted on 30 April 20155 July 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

Why do intranets fail?

Before going through an intranet governance checklist it’s useful first to think about the context and purposes of intranet governance. In our work we are often called in to rescue failing intranets. The following is a list of problems that we typically come across. They are all signs of poor or non-existent intranet governance:
Technology focused delivery – the project focuses on delivering the platform and an ’empty shell’ effectively for business users to populate and manage their own content. Business users do not have knowledge and skills to build out effective intranet sites and populate them with content. This problem often comes about due to oversold software platforms that promise out-of-the-box quick and easy deployment.

Lack of input from the business at design stage and post launch – gathering input from stakeholders at build stage is effectively gathering their support and fostering their engagement. Site and content ownership is rarely given as a primary responsibility and so stakeholders simply dont see the value versus their priorities. Its very easy to be too busy to work on the intranet. Involving stakeholders is an ongoing process post-launch, especially as people move and their roles change.

Lack of content strategy – There is no framework around who creates content, when and how. No defined taxonomy, no content curation process and undefined metadata rules. The intranet can be sprawling and chaotic in some areas and a desert in others.

Lack of site creation assistance and training – business stakeholders are left to their own devices to develop their own content and sites and therefore user experience is not consistent or large gaps exist. Content can also be poor quality.

Lack of funding – there is little or no resource assigned to managing and improving the intranet .The best intranets have a central team who beyond their day-to-day activities are planning strategy and interfacing with senior sponsors to secure budgets for ongoing management, intranet support and improvements.

Poor technical infrastructure – slow, buggy intranet platforms lead to frustration and site owners simply give up.

Poor user experience – badly designed and poorly structured intranets lead to confusion and inability to find content. Users simply give up. Poor user experience can also affect site owners who struggle to upload content.

Lack of senior level support – leaders dont show their support and so stakeholders and site owners dont invest time in a thankless activity. This often comes about because the intranet owner fails to show the value of the intranet and linking it to business goals.

What does intranet governance look like?

First, lets look at a definition:
Intranet governance is the rules, processes and people involved with managing and improving the intranet, and ensuring it supports business goals.”

A good intranet governance model includes:

A strategy & roadmap – showing where the intranet is headed and how it aligns with the organisations strategy

A steering team – with representation across key business functions. The team should meet regularly and have a clear, defined purpose.

Roles and responsibilities – for the various stakeholders such as the intranet team, the steering team, IT, content owners, the sponsor, etc.

Defined ownership – who owns what section; who is accountable and who makes decisions? Take a look at our RACI model for intranet governance.

Policies and guidelines – simple rules outlining what you can and cant do on the intranet, especially around quality, copy style, design, the homepage, the navigation

Feedback – mechanisms in place to gather feedback (e.g. user feedback, analytics, search logs) and act upon that feedback

Support – processes and people to support users and publishers when working on the intranet or when things go wrong.

Training – for end users but most importantly for content authors. Should include details on governance as well as technical elements

How to go about creating your governance framework

When working on developing your intranet governance avoid the temptation to create a long, heavy document because you will probably struggle to get people to read it. Instead create short punchy documents, slides or even FAQs (backed up with slides where necessary) that address specific audiences and specific need states. For example, if I am the sales director wanting to publish an article to the homepage to publicise my departments recent success in securing a big new client, I just need a few pointers: how do I get started?; quick writing tips; news upload instructions, where to turn if I have problems; etc…

Intranet hierarchy of needs

Posted on 20 April 20158 March 2024 by Hannah Barltrop

There are many ways to build a new intranet, or revamp an ageing one. Whatever your approach, your objective must be to create a useful, useable intranet that adds value to your business.

Design is a holistic process, but there are some foundation concepts that should be solidly addressed.

Security the foundation requirement of your digital workplace

If your intranet is internally hosted, then your IT department will manage security as they do for your whole network.

If your intranet, or part of it, is hosted in the cloud then the host will manage security as part of their service. Its a fact that if youre using SharePoint Online or Office 365 then Microsofts cloud security is second to none.

As architects or intranet managers, your concern should be about password management and authentication. The weak chink in your security is employees reusing personal passwords on every system. What does your Information Security Manager advise regarding password complexity? Heres the official Microsoft password checker (other checkers might be fake).

Single sign-on is a must; people expect enterprise software to know who they are once theyve logged on to their computer and intranet.

What about two-factor authentication? Incredibly secure, but Aviva found log-ins declined sharply when they experimented with two-factor.

Access and accessibility

Ease of logging-in brings us to access; if your intranet is secure yet staff and authorised people cannot log-in without having to call the IT helpdesk, your intranet will not be a value-adding place of work.

Do you allow home access? If your intranet is in the cloud or simply hosted externally by a partner company, then access over the Internet should be easy. If your intranet is internally hosted then your Info Sec and IT people need to decide whether to open it up to the Internet or create secure access via VPN.

Its not all about working from home of course, knowledge workers might be on a train, waiting at airports, or working from a clients office.

Which brings us to the topic of mobile access. If people are allowed access to your intranet while out and about with their laptop, what about on a phone or tablet? You may already issue iPads to executives can they access the intranet over 3G or Wi-Fi when not in the office? What about their company issued smartphones?

Access via personal tablets and smartphones is also a consideration. The information security risk can be greater, depending on what people are able to access, but arrangements can be made to mitigate the risk. Many enterprises support BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and deploy apps for secure communication. Mobile Device Management (MDM) can add a layer of security for company or personal devices.

A part of access is accessibility. Often swept aside as an issue that affects a small percentage of people, accessibility is actually about good design. Its about designing for real people, in different situations (in the office, walking in corridors, sat in a taxi) who have different needs and approaches to the screen and information.

Useful facilitating valuable work, reducing administrative burden

Who was it that said make it valuable, then easy, then fast, then pretty?

The usefulness of your intranet can only be measured against how it helps people support your organisations objectives. The very purpose of your intranet must be aligned with what people already do and actually need in order to work more efficiently and effectively.

This focus on productivity in no way invalidates the human side of business. Employee engagement, social communications, change management, and L&D can all be empowered and facilitated by a decent intranet platform.

Employees will only use the intranet if its of use to them. Its a tautology, but worth remembering. Home page communications will not, alone, draw people in. If the HR teams only accept request via email then they will live in their inbox. For the intranet to be useful to such a team, it would need to manage requests and workflows. Such an online approach should reduce admin burden and provide a more robust, auditable, service.

To monitor and demonstrate the intranets usefulness:

Review and develop KPIs that support business KPIs
Redevelop your intranet strategy to be sharper, and to directly support the business strategy
Revamp your intranet governance and ensure the right stakeholders are involved (via regular steering committee meetings).

Make your intranet into a company-wide service platform, rather than merely a cost to the IT and Comms departments.

Easy useable; works as needed and as expected

Hand-in-hand with useful comes the user experience (UX). This isnt simply about reducing clicks, but about providing an interface that allows experienced users to get on with things enabling less experienced people as well.

The only way to meet peoples needs and expectations is through ethnographic research. Following best practices will only get you so far. For example, stakeholders and the intranet manager may have strong ideas around what the main navigation menus should offer, but only from research can you find out what people really need and expect. Even menu names can be optimised to match peoples vocabulary; why use the technical name for your expense system if everyone just says expenses?

Whats the loading time of various intranet pages? Is it slower at different locations? Consider the network, server technology, and intranet design options available to optimise the speed of your intranet.

Design cant be a committee matter; a clear vision is required, backed up by relevant evidence. Design isnt just about how things look; design is about how things work. This is just as true for digital services as it is for real-life products.

What are peoples pain-points right now? How long does it take to complete an expense claim? How hard is it to update a document? Go around your organisation and discover what damages peoples intranet experience, then work out how to delight them.

Nice attractive, engaging; the form follows the function and directs use

People make up their minds about things in all sorts of illogical ways. The intranet could save a person hours each day, and they could still claim to hate it if it looks like something from the previous decade.

Its perfectly possible to design a home page and publish news and updates without photos or imagery of any kind. Our advice, however, is to really focus on the visuals communications, reference materials, and even forms benefit from relevant photos and illustrative graphics. Theres a definite shift to multimedia communications; user-generated videos and webinar recordings can make for engaging updates and support online learning.

Page layout and content design can quickly show people what they can do on the intranet faster. While forms may be boring, designing them for ease of use (considering the number of fields, clicks, and the order of everything) can save minutes, and frustration.

Work your way up the triangle

People wont thank you for a good-looking intranet that does nothing for them. Consider peoples needs in light of your organisations objectives, and get the foundations right.

Once your IT department and leaders are assured the intranet is secure, you can work on opening up access to people at home, to commuters, and to partners within your supply chain.

Once your intranet is truly useful a real enabler of business, you can work to refine how people use it, simplifying and streamline workflows, forms, and navigation.

Then you can optimise the reading experience to create a more engaging intranet.

Now, where within the triangle do you think social should sit? Collaboration might fit well within useful, but what about your enterprise social network and private messaging systems?

Reputation and trustworthy communications

Posted on 2 March 201529 September 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

Even when they bring out life-changing drugs, pharma companies have a problem gaining trust

The pharma industry has a reputation problem. HCPs and patients can be brand loyal to the drugs they rely on and believe in, but suspicious ofâ€¨the companies behind the drugs. Multinational drug companies, while operating in complex legislative regions, are watched by the global media. Everyone gets to hear about supply, trial, and marketing poor practices from other countries; global reputation is affected by local performance.

The reputation of any company is created byâ€¨the users of its products and services, and also by non-users; in this 24-hour news world, everyone has an opinion. Drug companies have many stakeholders, but two groups have a lot of influence healthcare professionals and patients. People talk about brand choices as if theyre deeply personal we advise our friends about which medicine to try with undeserved gravitas and HCPs rely on colleagues guidance.

Wheres the trust?

Since I was 19 Ive had ankylosing spondylitis – a chronic inflammatory disease. I wasnt diagnosed until I wasâ€¨30 but was told I had a bad back and told to take paracetamol. Even after diagnosis the stronger anti- inflammatories I received were ineffective. I often had flare-ups when I would be in a lot of pain and often had difficulty walking or doing much else. I was disillusioned with the healthcare service and the drug industry. When I was 35 I was prescribed a biologic treatment called an anti-TNF. It changed my life. And I mean those words.

My symptoms disappeared completely and have stayed away. I went from being weak, slow, drugged and in constant pain to being completely symptom-free. I am incredibly grateful for the drug company that brought this treatment to market. I believe in what they can do.

Every year I go for a routine check-up with the prescribing clinic to be prodded and poked and asked if the drug is still working. My recent meeting with the rheumatologist started in the usual way:

How do you feel?
â€¨Ive never felt better.
â€¨Your treatment is still working?
Yes, its changed my life

We went on to talk about how amazing the treatment was. He clearly had seen many others like me and was enthusiastic about its merits. Because I run a digital agency specialising in healthcare I always like to chat about the systems and applications they use in their clinic. The rheumatologist complained about how reliant they still were on paper-based data gathering to monitor patients and conduct clinical studies. He had however built an app for patients that was currently in use but he downplayed its success saying it was quite rudimentary and had a few bugs. The upshot was that there was little money available to digitise their data processes.

I suggested that he should approach drug companies for funding; his reply highlighted the mixed reputation of pharma companies: I really wouldnt want to do that. Well lose our perceived independence. Weve known some drug companies complain that the NHS is favouring one particular drug company over them. In some cases, they have been known to sue the NHS for this. And then theres the whole data privacy thing. We dont want to be seen to be giving patient data to the drug companies.

I was struck by what he had just said. Here was aâ€¨guy who two minutes previously had praised the treatment I was on and practically in the next breath was showing significant mistrust of the organisations who had brought that treatment to market. This polarised thinking underlines what a huge and complex task pharma faces in managing its reputation.

Social responsibility in action

Being a multinational company working in the global market has benefits of course (beyond the benefitsâ€¨of scale). Gileads reputation is much enhanced by its sensitive pricing strategies that mean it sells HIV drugs in Africa at a suitable price to the local economy and J&J always respond to disasters around the world, sending kit to meet the needs of people affected.

These serious initiatives demonstrate responsible global citizenship. But how are such initiatives communicated? CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) supports PR, but it isnt about PR. It certainly isnt about marketing. Getting the CSR message out is difficult and can even be met with cynicism by the public.

In recent years weve seen a lot of activity in the digital and social media space. Pharma companies have spent a lot of money on fancy websites, Facebook and Twitter campaigns aimed at enhancing reputation. A few have been very successful, theres no doubt. But companies have to be brutally honest with themselves. Many of these initiatives have missed the mark. The metrics many of them publically available as likes, comments, and views are mostly underwhelming. Just because the intention is good, and the creative idea is compelling, doesnt mean the campaign will be successful.

Looking at these campaigns, one thing jumps out: they are all dependent on creating a groundswell directly with the public, patients, or HCPs. This isâ€¨a really tough ask. Seeding a campaign directly to the public is very, very difficult if you are a drug company wanting to talk about a disease.

What very few companies have tried is building the digital groundswell amongst their own employeesâ€¨first and foremost. Its much easier for a company to reach its employees with a message than it is with the public. And surely employees are the best advocates? They are knowledgeable, they are (hopefully) engaged, they are more likely to be on-message. Whats more, when a company engages its employees to do good, they in turn feel good about their employer. This creates a virtuous circle, making them more likely to talk to others about their company, their work and their cause. And when an employee talks to a friend about their company in a positive light that message is heard and believed. This creates trust.

Putting CSR in the hands of employees may seem risky, but with clear goals and great co-ordination its really the most effective way to demonstrate authenticity. Digital technologies can mobilise great numbers of people when the cause is meaningful a genuine movementâ€¨is better than a campaign. Drug companies need to realise and release the power of employee advocacy, to demonstrate company values by responsible action.

And in time, I hope HCPs like my rheumatologist can trust the drug companies and not just the drugs.

Dan’s article was originally published in CommuniquÃ© magazine.

One hour intranet ideas to do right now

Posted on 2 February 201529 June 2022 by Hannah Barltrop

Look at your home page from top to bottom. Lets consider what you can improve with about an hours work, with no need to seek approval from your steering committee. Assuming youre the site / intranet manager, that is!

Navigation menus

This might take an hour per item much longer if you mean to do a full, robust overhaul. To really get into menu design you should consider navigation to be separate from the structure / IA of your intranet. Menus are about helping people get around, whatever the structure. Card sorting and treejacking are basic, necessary (but insufficient) tools to help match your menus to peoples needs.

But before you start a big navigation project, why not simply review the terminology within your menus. Is everything clear and obvious, or is there a lot of jargon?

Note your observations about obtuse menu labels in about an hour, and then work with your UX and steering committee, and the indicated site owners, over the next fortnight to make improvements. Be sure to publish a news article or intranet blog to explain what youre doing (always keep people informed).

Headlines

Look at your home page. Are headlines too long? Many organisations aim for five or six words, or perhaps a certain character count. Do your headlines end-up on three lines, rather than one or two? The most important thing, in my opinion, is using unambiguous headlines. Headlines are not supposed to tickle peoples fancies; they are supposed to help a person decide what to read and what not to read.

Take ten minutes to note the headline length and clarity, then work with your internal communications team to set the guidelines to be succinct and clear.

Summaries

Directly below headlines you should offer a sentence, just a few words, to express the what and who of the article. Its all about helping people work out if the article is relevant to them.

Are summaries written with the home page in mind, or are they just the first sentence from the article? Take ten minutes to assess the clarity of summaries, and then work with the internal communications team to set the guidelines for bespoke summaries.

Photos / images

Does your home page look the same as it did a fortnight ago? Fresh, relevant images for each main article can help communicate that your intranet is a vibrant, up-to-date place. Images need to be relevant take care using stock photos. Try to use snaps taken with peoples smartphones whenever you can. Set standard dimensions for a pleasing, consistent page layout.

Text

This is a big one, as it can have implications for design / layout across your site / intranet. But the principles can be reviewed and set in less than an hour, so get your UX pro and IT people talking about:

Font-family is it readable on different resolution screens? Is each letterform clear, or might you choose a different font-family?
Text size increase the text size a bit. It helps everyone. Dont let your chief designer tell you that people can increase the font-size themselves using their browser because people dont know about this browser feature and dont do it even when they do.
Line-height increase the space between lines of text (called leading in the print world). This will dramatically increase readability, understanding, and instantly makes your pages look clear and designer-y. It just does!
Paragraphs maybe increase the whitespace between paragraphs a smidge. Again, it increases readability. Talk to internal comms team members and content authors about ideal sentence length and ideal paragraph size. Generally, we need more paragraph breaks!

Navigation aids

When a person is at the bottom or a page, or end of an article, what do they have to do? Are they forced to scroll all the way back to the top to navigate away?

Place a Back to top link in the footer / at the bottom of every page. An hours work for immediate benefit! Just do it.

What other in-page links or navigation aids might your colleagues expect? Review famous websites and reflect on how they help you get around.

Logo

Make sure your company / intranet logo (or name) is clickable and takes you directly to the home page. You may need to get IT involved if you cant hack the code yourself. This is about creating a consistent and trustworthy way for anyone anywhere to jump to the home page. Its expected behaviour (because external websites all do this) so it should happen on your intranet. Might take you ten minutes, and needs no approval just do it!

Search box

Make sure your search box meets peoples expectations it should be in the upper-right of your pages, and:

Use a simple magnifying glass icon.
Have an open text box to type in (i.e. not just the magnifying glass).
Ensure the input is submitted by clicking the magnifying glass icon as well as hitting the Enter key on ones keyboard. Let people do what they prefer.
Consider assigning a keyboard shortcut so that people can jump to the search box and simply start typing. Keyboard shortcuts can enhance the accessibility of your intranet.
Consider making the search box hold the cursor be default in other words, as the page loads, the cursor is already in the search box.
No need to place the word Search in grey text within the search box people should be familiar with your intranet and what else could the box be? Ensure the search icon is clear, and that you use semantic mark-up in the code to label the search as search.

Youll probably need ITs help, and you may have an experienced UX professional on hand to guide you. But otherwise this is a global improvement you can just get on with.

Footer

I bet you get a lot of requests for new links to be popped into your main global navigation. This is a big deal because you have to be strategic about global navigation, yet its hard to say no to the H&S director.

Consider developing a fat footer place secondary links and helpful links in the global footer. Nobody will use it very often, but the links are always there when a need arises. A fat footer can be developed over time to be beautiful and useful, but can start with a dozen not-very-important but needed links, grouped by category.

Just do it

These nine intranet ideas might take you seven to fifteen hours to assess, implement, and test. Thats not a lot of time for quite a lot of value. Remember to consider the governance of your intranet for continuous improvement purposes, and keep contributors and end-users informed.

What else can you improve about your intranet in an hour?

The 5 minute business case for a mobile website and intranet

Posted on 3 October 20145 July 2023 by Hannah Barltrop

Your website must support your overall business strategy, and you no doubt care about engagement, conversions (of some kind), and ultimately, sales.

Equally, your intranet must support your business strategy, and help employees get things done efficiently and effectively.

But your website, alongside your social channels, also supports your PR and reputation.

Hopefully, you and your stakeholders consider your online estate, of website and intranet, to be invaluable, but youre missing out if they do not work well on mobiles and tablets. If people cant use your website on smaller screens, they go elsewhere meaning your website is not as valuable as it could be. Further, the frustration caused to your mobile visitors could harm your reputation.

Employees with mobile access to a non-optimised intranet will struggle to complete tasks even tablets may offer a poor experience owing to the small navigation targets that can be hard to touch with a finger.

Yet it can be daunting to prove that moving to a mobile friendly design is worth the effort, and so heres exactly what to do go straight to your stats.

Step 1 compare the dwell time of visitors

Find the average length of time people spend on individual pages; this is sometimes called dwell time in conversation. Remember that very short visits are considered bounces and are of little value. When you compare time spent on your site by desktop users with time spent by mobile users, youll see a stark difference.

Google Analytics gives you the average session duration for desktop, mobile, and tablet users within the Audience > Mobile > Overview report.

If your website is not optimised for mobile surfers, you might see that the average session duration for mobile is in the seconds basically, people bounce off your site when they realise its taking too long to load, or when they get frustrated with having to zoom in on tiny navigation.

In comparison, desktop dwell time should be in the minutes as people take the time to look around, and properly read your content.

A further column within the same Google Analytics report may tell you that people look at four or five pages on desktop, but only one or two on their mobile.

Yes, people have different priorities when using their mobile device to surf your site they may just want your location, or your latest blog article, but these things are still very much enhanced by a site design that is optimised for mobile and tablet use.

Employees have different priorities when using mobiles too often its about locations, phone numbers, and maybe approving documents and decisions. Optimising your intranet for mobile use isnt about making all the content available, its about making the right content and functions work well on smaller screens.

Yahoo! Going beyond clicks – the importance of dwell time.

Step 2 make the case for mobile

The business case is clear. Now that youve done your three minutes of statistical research, you need only communicate what your company is missing out on.

X% of our web visitors use a mobile device, yet our website is not optimised for smaller screens and so performs poorly for these mobile visitors. Desktop visitors spend Y minutes on our site, giving them time to understand our offer, whereas mobile visitors spend around Z minutes on our site they reject our websites design and go elsewhere.
Desktop visitors tend to view V number of pages, and mobile visitors tend to view only W.
With these facts, we know we are missing an opportunity to engage certain potential clients, who expect a company like ours to be available to them any time, anywhere.
Optimising our website design for mobile use would capture this missed opportunity, and we would then see a marked increase in dwell time and page views, affording us greater chance to truly engage more potential clients.

If employees have mobile access to a non-optimised intranet, you could write a similarly concise business case based on your intranet stats. If employees do not have mobile / home access to the intranet at all then youll need to build a case for providing secure access and a mobile solution.

In five minutes, you can justify the move to a responsive web design or a mobile version of your online presence. The solution may take some time to implement, but once stakeholders agree that mobile must be part of your website strategy, momentum and budget will follow.

A gold win for CSR at the Intranet Innovation Awards

Posted on 25 September 201429 June 2022 by Hannah Barltrop

Larger companies take corporate social responsibility very seriously; its more about local actions than mere policies. Johnson & Johnson wanted to support Operation Smile, and get their employees around the Asia Pacific region directly involved.

Content Formula, SharePoint consultancy, was asked to help mobilise 15,000 employees across different operating companies, so we had to develop a single approach that suited a diverse audience.

The SharePoint site design won a gold award in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards, and were very proud of the win, but also pleased to have the opportunity to work on a campaign that had such real-world impact.

Making Smiles – a social intranet to engage employees around CSR from Content Formula

Our SharePoint consultancy designed and deployed a secure intranet solution that encouraged employees to get involved and share the challenge of raising money via built-in social tools and networking. The making smiles, changing lives campaign raised enough to help over 1,500 children with cleft palates or cleft lips.

More than just an information hub, the site enabled people to create groups and events to raise money, and invite colleagues to grow awareness and involve more people. Allowing people to share their event photos made sure there was always fresh content and reason to return, and of course people were proud to share how much money they were raising.

Operation Smile actually invited several J&J employees to help run week-long missions in the field, and employees then reported back via blogs, photos, and videos on the campaign site. Mobile access was therefore crucial for those in the field, and for everyone during their commute and when at home. We would say, if you want to drive employee engagement, mobile access is vital.

The campaign was a success not only because it restored so many smiles, but also because it engaged thousands of employees across Asia Pacific, helping J&J maintain their engagement and company ethos across the region. Were pleased the campaign has been recognised (thank you, Step Two), and thrilled to have been part of such a cause.

At Content Formula were working more and more on employee engagement campaigns and intranets. Weve developed an employee engagement methodology to help drive the form and function of these campaigns.

Take a look at a couple of other similar case studies where we used our methodology: Better World Walk and I am Ethicon.

How Microsoft is integrating Yammer into SharePoint 2013

Posted on 4 August 20147 March 2024 by Hannah Barltrop

===update 27th May 2016===

With the demise of Yammer Conversations what looked like quite a cool initiative to bring Yammer comments into Office Docs and vice versa you might be forgiven for thinking that there’s not been much progress in integrating Yammer into the wider Office 365 suite.

I just returned from a Future of SharePoint session held at Microsoft’s London office for SharePoint consultancies. The talk was hosted by Jeff Teper, VP of SharePoint and One Drive. He’s the man with the vision when it comes to SharePoint. In the last month we’ve seen some really quite exciting announcements about SharePoint – it seems Microsoft is starting to really invest in this tool. However, what was surprising about this talk is that there was zero mention of Yammer. I went and spoke to the host at the end and asked him what are the plans for integrating SharePoint with Yammer.

First, I was assured by the SharePoint team that Microsoft is not going to kill Yammer and that they are actively investing in it. Before any serious out-of-the-box Yammer integration can go ahead the team are rebuilding the back end of the application. This is so that it can be hosted in Microsoft’s various Office 365 data centres around the world. Once this is done they are going to look at hooking the two tools together. For example, we can expect to see a ‘share on Yammer’ button next to files in SharePoint and OneDrive. In the meantime, we are going to have to continue working with custom integrations and the Yammer app all mentioned in our original post from August 2014 below.

Dan Hawtrey

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Microsoft is working tirelessly to integrate Yammer with SharePoint 2013. We take a look at the features you can expect very soon that will make your intranet more social.

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The Microsoft digital workplace new tools to get to grips with

Posted on 4 August 201429 June 2022 by Hannah Barltrop

The intranet is no longer one thing. While the intranet may be the foundation of the digital workplace, it is made up of several platforms and tools. If SharePoint has always been your focus, prepare for the new wave of Microsoft tools to enhance your ways of working. Continue reading “The Microsoft digital workplace new tools to get to grips with”

Top 10 Search Features in SharePoint 2013

Posted on 28 July 201414 November 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

As someone who has been focusing on Enterprise Search in SharePoint for years, I can say I now know it inside out. There are things I like a lot, there are others I dont like too much. In this blog post, I decided to collect 10 new or improved features that are my top favorites and that make SharePoint 2013 Search a real enterprise solution.

1 One, Integrated Enterprise Search Core

In SharePoint 2010, there was a Search Engine (a.k.a. SharePoint Search), but we also had the opportunity to install FAST Search for SharePoint (a.k.a. FS4SP) in order to get real, enterprise level features. FS4SP had to get licensed and installed as a separate product, as a separate farm, and then we could integrate it with SP2010.

In SharePoint 2013, the whole story is much easier: the big FAST Search engine got 100% integrated into SharePoint, therefore no separate installation and maintenance is needed. As soon as you install SharePoint 2013, you get the big engine instantly.

2 Content Processing, Entity Extraction

Content Processor is a component that sits in between the Crawler and the Indexer. It is responsible for processing the crawled content. It does all sorts of clever stuff including language detection, extracting security descriptions (to determine who in your organization is allowed to see the content), parsing, linguistic processing (to understand the real meaning of the content), entity and metadata extraction, etc.

There are two things Id like to highlight here. First is the Web Service Callout step. This option is very useful if you need to perform custom operations on the crawled items before they are processed further.

The second step to highlight is the Custom Entity Extraction. Most organisations have specific terms (a.k.a entities) that are commonly used in everyday business. Its useful to tell the search engine to look out for some of these words because they carry particular significance for that company . For example, product names or regions where the company operates. The Custom Entity Extraction process extracts words (entities) from the content and use them as metadata in the index. This metadata can be used for filtering, ordering as well as facets on the Refinement Panel. The entities are pre-defined in a dictionary which is created by the organisation. See below an screengrab which shows how custom entities can be useful on the search results page to help the user zero in on what he is looking for.

Both Web Service Callouts and Entity Extraction work on any type of Content Source, therefore can be used to unify and standardize the metadata in the index.

3 Continuous Crawl

Besides Full and Incremental Crawl, theres a new option in SharePoint 2013 called Continuous Crawl. This is a very dynamic and agile way of crawling that uses SharePoints change log to pick up the changes and enumerate the items which have to get crawled. One of its biggest benefits is in its flexibility and agility: the new and changed items can get indexed in minutes or even seconds, therefore we get a good basis for real, always up-to-date Search Based Applications.

Second, Continuous Crawl can rut at the same time as Full Crawl, therefore it can be used to keep the index refreshed or up-to-date, even if the Full Crawl takes a long time (days or weeks).

Continuous Crawl is available on SharePoint content sources only.

4 Search Administration on Multiple Levels

Due to the complexity of Search in SharePoint 2013, search administrators have complex tasks and responsibilities. Delegating some of these tasks might become essential.

In SharePoint 2013, search administration tasks can be delegated to Site Collection administrators and even to Site administrators.

5 Troubleshooting Enhancements

As Murphys Law says, If anything can go wrong, it will. Enterprise Search is really complex, and any of its components can go wrong. The better troubleshooting tools we have, the easier to fix these issues.

In SharePoint 2013, we have enhanced logs and reports on the server-side that can be used to debug and identify the causes of issue. The enhanced Developer Dashboard can be also used for debugging, and despite its name, its not for developers only.

6 PowerShell

PowerShell is Microsofts scripting technology that has modules for SharePoint administration and automation, too. A huge improvement in SharePoint 2013 is that we have more than 150 commands for Enterprise Search management, including setup and deployment, topology management, crawling, query processing, metadata, etc.

7 UI Enhancements

One of the most important UI enhancements is the new Hover Panel, where the search results metadata and related actions can be displayed, as well as its outline and preview if the result is a document. Besides the Hover Panel, I also like how easy it is to customize the way search results are displayed: Display Templates are responsible for the display of the results, the Hover Panel and the refiners. Display Templates are simple HTML and JavaScript files, with structures that are easy to understand. Customization is easier than ever.

8 Result Sources

Result Sources are used to define the index to be used in our queries (is it a local SharePoint index or a remote one from a separate content source such as Lotus Notes?). They also describe the subset of results to retrieve (these were called search scopes in SharePoint 2010). Results Sources can be very useful to define verticals for our Search and ultimately help the user focus her search.

9 Query Rules

Query Rules help us to define rules that are based on the users intent when searching. For example if I search for Harrods department store there is a high likelihood that I want to know the location or see a map; view opening and closing times; or to get a link to their online store. Technically speaking, Query Rules contain conditions and actions. A condition can be based on the query itself (contains one or more specific keywords, matches terms defined in a Managed Metadata Term Set, etc.) or on the user (for example the department he or she works, job title, location, etc.). Of course, these conditions can be combined.

Actions are all about promoting the right results to the user – displaying specific Result Blocks or modifying the current query.

Some examples:

If the user is based in Europe (condition), display a Result Block that highlights the latest documents related to the European market (action).
If the query contains the keyword define (condition), display the results (definitions) from the Company Knowledge Base (action).

10 Search Query Builder

Last but not least, Id like to highlight the wizard that is used in every Search Web Part in SharePoint 2013. This is the Search Query Builder that helps not only in building the query to be used, but also in choosing the result source as well as filters, ranking models, etc. It also gives us the opportunity to test the results of the current settings before saving anything. This can speed up the configuration of search dramatically.

Summary

As you can see, Search in SharePoint 2013 has a lot of components that can be and have to be used in order to get a real, enterprise-level Search Application. In this blog post I highlighted what I consider as the top 10, but of course, there are many more, and the beauty of Enterprise Search is always in the details!

Agnes Molnar is the founder of Search Explained, a Content Formula partner.

http://SearchExplained.com
[email protected]