Intranet Basics:
Intranet Advanced:
Intranet Tips:
Intranets and Google:
Common Intranet Administration Errors
Everyone is prone to mistakes, but some mistakes are more costly than others. Forgetting about a lunch date, for instance, is a lot less costly than locking your keys in your car. But unlike both of these examples, making mistakes in your intranet’s design can have long-lasting effects. If you let too many mistakes slide you’ll see your intranet’s usage plummet. And without intranet users, your intranet might as well not exist.
Too Much Security - Is There Such a Thing?
Don’t get us wrong, we are a big fan of intranet security. There is just something about a stable, working intranet that makes a business a happy business. What you might confuse for stability might rather be a nasty mistake - perhaps an example of too much security.
Some content on intranets are considered to be highly confidential. Likewise, security should be applied with an increased sense of fervor. There are two pitfalls here that the common administrator may make: putting links to this restricted content where anyone can see it, or putting an increased amount of security over the entire intranet.
For the first problem, you’ll leave the majority of the company in the dark. Leaving links on the homepage, for instance, would mean that a good deal of your company may try to access the content. When they get an “Access Denied” error, they start to lose faith in the intranet’s credibility as a useful tool. After all, shouldn’t all parts of the intranet work for the masses? Instead, leave the link out and instead post it where only those who need access to the confidential content can see it. (A login page, for instance.)
For the second problem, we have an even bigger problem: your intranet is painfully inefficient. If users have to login to multiple types of services, they are wasting company time. It may even become enough of a hassle that users make an effort not to use the intranet’s services at all. In this sense it is often better to tone security down, and keep employee satisfaction at an acceptable level.
Overlooking Petty Intranet Tasks
It will often become necessary to move files around on an intranet. What is often overlooked is the fact that as content is moved, so must all other content that links to it. This is a large inconvenience but it keeps intranet information reliable. But as stated before; too much hassle means less intranet users.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have services that aren’t available yet - but are linked to anyway. These inactive services are often what will become a classic “Under construction” page. Although these do spread the word about the new service, which is good for proper marketing, it also effectively tells users “Here’s the service - but it isn’t ready yet.” This in itself isn’t an intranet crime but once a user sees this page once, when do you think they will check back? Like most people, they most likely won’t - it would waste their time to constantly check for an update. If a typical “Under construction” page has to be used be sure to include an estimated date in which it will be ready.
And lastly for petty intranet tasks, we have the intranet ghost town. The intranet ghost town is typically seen when the last news update (or any content update for that matter) was several months ago. If an intranet is going to succeed it needs fresh content. If a user knows that new content hasn’t been published on the intranet for several months, what is his or her incentive to check in the next several months? Important events or company news could be posted, and over half of the company probably wouldn’t even notice.
Advice for your Content Woes
Content is essentially the basis of your intranet. It is what users access, read, share, and work with. Following suit with this importance, we have the need for a simple means of getting the content to the user with the simplest (yet easiest) route possible.
The number one downfall of intranet content is clutter. It would be easy to put all the content on your intranet on one page, but it wouldn’t be practical. Thus, we should follow a simplistic and minimalistic design when creating content for intranet use. Yet on the flip side, we have content that is spaced out too far. If there are more links than content we start to see a problem. It is good to space out content for maximum readability, but too much space means more clicking links than reading content.
Lastly, we have repetitive content. Intranet users like to read content and then move onto another subject of equal interest. If content on your intranet repeats itself we run into a problem. This will lose the employee’s attention, yet also prove that the hours put into the content creation were in vain. Ask yourself; would you rather read the same book twice, or read two different books? It is said that repetition can penetrate the dullest minds, but yet again that would still require that these minds are paying attention to the content.
Closing Comments
It’s easy to point your finger at what is wrong and what needs fixed. In the example of broken links, for example, it is much easier to point the mistake out than to fix every single link on your intranet. Moving just a few content pages could equal an hour in updating links, depending on the content. But don’t lose sight of the goal: a perfect intranet.
If it is mistakes you are looking to avoid, it only requires effort. In that sense, there isn’t anything a little elbow grease can’t fix.
