Breaking News – Members of our Marketing team were yesterday granted a temporary leave pass to escape the office for a few hours.

While the hectic weeks leading up to a significant release usually see staff bid farewell to their loved ones, surrender keys to any fast-moving mode of transport and substitute sunlight with high potency Vitamin D tablets, an exception was made in this case.

Never fear, before war cries of  ‘release the hounds!’ start getting thrown around you should all know – it was an educational venture.

They attended the book tour for James Robertson’s newly released ‘Designing Intranets – A Guide to Creating Sites that Work’. James is the Managing Director of Step Two Designs, who provide consulting and mentoring services around intranets, among a variety of other things.

James shared some really interesting insights around what he feels goes into making a great intranet design. We won’t spoil the book for you – you can get your hands on a copy here – but it’s definitely worth a read, and would be a great resource for any budding re-designers out there looking for a little inspiration.

There really aren’t a great deal of resources out there giving intranet teams real-world insights into what makes a good intranet, great. As James pointed out yesterday, there seems to be a cone of silence when it comes to intranets; we’re all a bit afraid to get nosey.

Having never been fans of silence and as huge advocates for nosiness, we are with James – the more of us that get talking, the better our intranets will be. At the risk of ripping off what may have been a tag line for a United Colors of Benetton commercial – together we do better.

So get talking…what do you think goes into a great intranet?

Qantas subsidiary, budget airline, our client and all round crowd pleaser – Jetstar – know a thing or two about the challenges of catering to a dispersed workforce. At any given time,  they could have anywhere up to three quarters of their 3000 strong team on the move and in the skies.

To combat the difficulties, and subsequent inefficiencies associated with having an office that spans the Asia Pacific region, Jetstar purchased Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) in 2007 – signaling the birth of JEN (Jetstar Employee Network).

Since then, they have worked with the iD team to improve their intranet and ensure its ongoing success. It now forms an integral part of their business, with employees depending on JEN to make their often hectic lives easier. With limited time to access information critical to their job, ease of use is critical in keeping users coming back to the intranet. Jetstar needs to ensure employees can rely on JEN as the central hub of activity within the business – the place to go to get things done.

Jetstar recently worked with the iD Team to set up Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities for their users. Employees logging on externally to any of Jetstar’s internal systems are now required to login through JEN to do so – effectively establishing the intranet as the front door to the organization. Once employees have been correctly authenticated against Jetstar’s systems, they must pass a 2 factor authentication process developed specifically for them by the iD team. SSO ensures external access to Jetstar’s internal systems is a simple and secure process for employees – perfect for a workforce on the move.

SSO’s secondary function at Jetstar is to enable login credentials to be shared with their other internal HR systems. Once a user has logged into JEN, credentials are passed on to connected systems so that when a user clicks a link within the intranet, they are automatically authenticated and can move seamlessly into the new system without being required to login again. With SSO, users move seamlessly between applications without ever appearing to leave the intranet.

For more information on Jetstar’s intranet, see our Case Studies page.

This is quite a common question. Once time, effort and resources have gone into creating your intranet, how can you be sure staff are even accessing it, let alone reaping any of the hard-earned business benefits you have so carefully laid out? Like a parent on the first day of school, you can pack their lunch, dress them and drop them off but you can’t sit in class to make sure they’re learning. Don’t despair though, there are ways…

One approach, and perhaps the most obvious, is to track users’ access. Reporting tools such as iD’s Statistics Reporter can provide you with a quick snapshot of the traffic to your intranet, to give you a feel for what’s happening, to who, and when. What it can’t tell you, is whether or not your users are getting anything out of their time on the intranet.

Time would be better spent focusing on making your intranet engaging, useful and business-critical, so users will not only want to use it, but will depend on it to complete their daily duties.

There are a lot of factors which influence user access to the intranet, including:

Culture – Is using the intranet an integral part of your company culture i.e ‘Have you seen what’s on Flowercorp today?’ or ‘That’s a great idea, let’s create a forum topic on Flowercorp to get some feedback’

Content – Does the intranet contain relevant, up-to-date information that users will want, but more importantly need, to access?

Contribution – Are users trained and actively encouraged to contribute to the Intranet?

Importance – Is it the main repository of information – the source of truth – where users know they will be able to find exactly what they are looking for, quickly and easily?

Something as simple as moving the weekly newsletter onto the intranet instead of offering it via email or in paper-based format can have an enormous effect on users, pulling them to the system to get the information they need.

Another interesting idea is to create an area specifically for users to interact socially. This gives them a relaxed environment to start contributing to and encourages them to log on to see the latest information. An example is shown below using iD’s Coffee Break site.

So rather than focus your energies on monitoring the usage behaviors of your intranet’s users, why not take a closer look at exactly what you are offering and what you could do to improve your user experience. Make it as engaging as possible and they’ll actually want to use it.

To coincide with the launch of iD 3, we have released the iD Help site, a comprehensive online resource aimed at empowering you to get the most out of iD.

iD Help is freely and readily available – simply visit http://help.intranetdashboard.com

Explore this extensive resource at your own pace and discover all there is to know about:

• iD Tools and Applications
• System Administration
• iD Extras

Improve the knowledge base of all your intranet users and in turn, the overall standard of your intranet.

Make the iD Help site your first stop for all support queries. Click here to Explore Now.

*As seen on CMS Wire

CMS Wire has declared Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) the temporary victor in our long-running David and Goliath battle with Microsoft SharePoint. After coming away with not one, but two Intranet Journal Product of the year awards, we didn’t think life could get much sweeter and yet here we are. See below for the full article.

‘It’s not often that Microsoft gets beat in the intranet and collaboration game — what with its market leading SharePoint (MOSS) flying off the shelves and garnering much recent media attention.

The other day, however, Intranet Journal announced that Melbourne, Australia-based Intranet DASHBOARD had won, not one, but two awards in its first reader judged Product of the Year Awards. They went home the winner for both Best Intranet Design Software and Best Hosted Intranet Solution.’ Click here to read more »

*As seen on Intranet Journal

Interview with co-founder and CEO of Intranet DASHBOARD, Campbell Dobbin, following our dual victory at the Intranet Journal Product of the Year Awards 2007.

Big Clients Drive Intranet DASHBOARD’s Success

The biggest winner in Intranet Journal’s first annual Product of the Year awards was the away team, because Intranet DASHBOARD, based in Melbourne, Australia, swept two categories. It won for Best Intranet Design Software and Best Hosted Intranet Solution, beating such names as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Vialect IntraNet, HyperOffice, and Central Desktop.

Intranet DASHBOARD is currently used in 46 countries by more than 500 clients, including the Shell Group, Adidas, and Fantastic Sams. The clients appreciate Intranet DASHBOARD’s unified approach, ease of use, and rapid deployment. While the company has kept a fairly low profile in the U.S. so far, it’s starting to crow about its comprehensive and elegant intranet solution. Click here to read more »

*As seen in Network World

Building an intranet is not for the faint-hearted. Being internal resources, intranets tend to evolve rapidly and reflect the changing focus that a line-of-business has as it iterates towards gathering and presenting the data and intelligence it needs online to function.

The result of this evolution is that the IT guys are going to need antidepressants due to the extra workload. That is, unless they have a tool kit that can provide an easily edited and managed framework.

Such a framework is what Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) is all about. Click here to read more »

*As seen in Intranet Journal

Intranet DASHBOARD Lights the Way

To the creators of Intranet DASHBOARD (iD), an installed intranet creation tool, there have been three phases of corporate intranet development: too simple (imagine an unadorned list of links), too complex (massive systems that don’t deliver what they promise), and, finally, just right.

That last one refers to their own product, which they describe as a consolidated, holistic approach to intranet creation. Intranet DASHBOARD makes creating an intranet simple enough for people with little development experience, while allowing them to create sites that are loaded with useful features and applications. It lets users make attractive sites with multiple subsections and group administrators, a system that puts each internal group in control of the look and content of its area. Click here to read more »