Australia Council for the Arts (ACA) has stepped up to the social media mark and integrated micro-blogging phenomenons Twitter and Yammer into their iD intranet.
NB: We were forced to exclude Yammer from the headline, not for want of trying but simply because the verb associated with using it evades us at this point. ‘Yamming’? ‘Yammering’? Either way, we simply could not afford a faux pas here.
ACA is the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body, responsible for the allocation of over $158 million annually in funding to arts organizations and individual artists across the country.
In the only known parallel drawn between them and the National Rugby League (NRL) – other than the matching sized acronyms – they have both recently upgraded to iD 3 and are doing some very exciting things with the new functionality available in the latest version of iD (see Friday’s blog post).
A client since 2008, ACA recently enlisted the help of the iD team to do a complete redesign of their intranet to coincide with their upgrade. They wanted to re-vamp the site’s look and feel, with the goal of pulling more people to the intranet, engaging them in an interactive experience and ultimately keep them coming back.
Having previously struggled with employee uptake of the intranet, ACA saw the release of iD 3 as the perfect opportunity to turn things around create a brand-spanking new site their employees would actually want to visit.
Click on the image below to see the new design for yourself.
Big thank you to ACA for allowing us to use this screen shot.
Disclaimer – This article in no way suggests you turn your ‘eback’ on traditional textual content for your intranet. Words included in this article such as ‘carousel’ may encourage a fun theme park notion, leading the more impressionable among us to seek a ‘higher level of interaction’ and communicate to users through a series of brightly colored pictures only. While ultimately hilarious, this is not a wise idea. Think of it this way – just because your liturgical dance skills would put a mute Olympic ribbon-twirler to shame does not mean you should stop talking.
So to reiterate – great content is always going to be one of the most important factors in keeping intranet users engaged. That said, including exciting visuals and interactive functionality is another great way to enhance the overall user experience and push previously underrated intranet pages into the spotlight.
To set the scene – your boss has returned victorious from a phenomenally successful sales expo with a series of high resolution images so majestic and thought-provoking you will be fielding head-hunter calls from The National Geographic for months to come. They would like you to share them on the intranet, and have visualized them sliding smoothly/gracefully onto the screen.
With iD CMS, available in the latest version of iD, this is one request you can fulfill with ease using iD CMS’ HTML component.
Click here to read more »
Forgive us for the title; resistance proved futile.
In other news – as we have highlighted in our earlier posts, some of our clever clients are doing some really impressive things with iD CMS. The new functionality included in iD 3 seems to have awakened the inner-creative in clients all over the world who, in conjunction with our design teams, have produced some amazing results.
One such example is Cummins Bridgeway, who has graciously allowed us to share a screen shot of their home page.
As a distributor for Cummins – global power leader and the biggest name in diesel engines in the US – Cummins Bridgeway provides products and services for customers over an enormous territory including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.
Cummins Bridgeway purchased iD in 2009, and since then have set about creating an innovative, fun and engaging intranet for their workforce of almost 1000. Working in conjunction with our design team, they have used iD CMS to create a unique and interactive homepage design.
The design goes beyond simply reflecting corporate branding, to actively support and reinforce company culture and inject a sense of fun into day to day happenings in the business.
Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge the image. Enjoy!
Done anything exceptional with iD CMS that you’re particularly proud of? We’d love to see it. Share your success stories with us in the Comments section below.
Is your company one of the millions around the world that use Microsoft Exchange with Outlook Web Access (OWA)?
If so, chances are that at some point, your staff will suffer from SOA – or Sudden Onset Amnesia, a phenomenon associated with users desperately trying, and all-too-often failing to remember their company’s OWA URL. This crippling e-illness has a number of symptoms, including user-frustration, lack of uptake and increased calls to your Help Desk.
To try and remedy this confusing issue, there is always the quick fix of including the link somewhere within your intranet to direct users externally to OWA. However, to guarantee the long-term sanity of everyone involved, a better solution would be to seamlessly integrate Outlook Web Access into your intranet.
Keep all your users in the one place, cut out the confusion and establish your intranet as the epicenter of your organization – the place to go to get things done. The less you take users outside your intranet to other applications, the more accustomed they get to your system being the key source of information within your organization – and the more valuable it becomes to both users and administrators.
How to integrate OWA with iD CMS
- Create a new page
- Drag a Webpage Frame Component onto the page
- Set the URL of the Frame to the OWA web address
- Edit the ‘Component Properties’ to adjust the size of the frame
Displaying other sections of OWA by Default
You can easily change the default OWA interface, or even access shared mailboxes using OWA Web Parts.
For example:
- Loading a shared calendar:
https:// Outlook Web Access URL /owa/ SMTP address of the other mailbox /?cmd=contents&module=calendar
- Loading the logged in users calender
https:// Outlook Web Access URL /owa/?cmd=contents&module=calendar
For more details, click here.
Further Reading
Twitter is everywhere these days . As new words such as Tweeting, Twitterati, Twits and Trending (scarily) make their way into casual conversation, the microblogging giant is carving itself out a place in the business world as an invaluable marketing and communications tool – all this in 140 characters or less.
Now using iD CMS, you can easily embed a Twitter feed into your intranet. Other popular web based content such as Google Maps or Youtube for example, can also be dragged onto a page using the HTML Component.
We have created a more detailed instructional page to step you through the process on the iD Help Site, but in brief – edit an iD CMS page, drag and drop the HTML component onto your web page, add some HTML/Javascript (we use JQuery here) and voila! You have a Twitter feed in your intranet.
