Based on my experience, I recommend following 10 best practices to engage your employees and improve your intranet portal. (excuse typos, it is still work in progress article)
10 Best Practices to improve Intranet
- Intranet as Default Site
- Set Intranet URL as a default browser URL thru Desktop Policies
- This will force every employee of the organization to check the Intranet home page
- This will allow them to familiarize with Intranet
- Curiosity will allow the users to navigate the site
- Announcements & Updates
- Have the latest announcements & Updates published on the home page of the Intranet
- All the announcements circulated thru mails should be published on the Intranet home page like Cricket match banner, Colors Day, Labs reach-out banner.
- All these announcements should have expiry date setup, after certain period they should automatically disappear from the homepage.
- Also, educate the HR and Corporate Communication teams to Use the Intranet Home Page to reach out to the Employee, along with sending mails
- Announcement & Update mails should have links Intranet for future reference.
- Ownership of the Home Page
- Corporate Communication team should own the home page of the Intranet and main site contents
- In Intranet, you should have taxonomy mapped to reflect your organization structure
- For each department, have a separate sub-site under Intranet
- Each of this site should be managed by respective department
- Each department should have the project / team sites which will be managed by their respective Leads / Managers
- Users should have complete control on the sites which they are working on / based on their responsibility.
- Contacts
- Have all the User Profiles imported from Active Directory
- AD should have upto date User information
- AD should have Reporting Structure & Organization structure clearly defined
- Have People Search enabled on the Home page of the portal
- Have a single DNS address for the Intranet
- Instead of having multiple DNS addresses for each and every application, have a single DNS entry like http://intranet
- All other applications which are supporting should have intranet Child URLs (eg: Wiki --> http://intranet/wiki, Blogs --> http://intranet/blogs )
- If we have a single URL, it is easy to use and reduces lot of Confusion about the URLs
- This will be easy for users to get to the other sites by navigating from homepage
- Taxonomy
- Change the Portal Structure to match the Departments
- Have Department Sites
- Department Sites should have Project / Initiative sites as Sub-sites
- All the Shared Folder content should be uploaded into respective sites
- Reduce Shared Folder & Email Documents culture
- Create multiple user groups and assign the permissions based on the scope
- Search
- Information Architecture should allow easy access to role specific / related information
- Configure search and search scopes to find information easily
- Enable federated search
- Allow search filtering
- User Privileges
- Identify user permissions based on roles and responsibilities
- Privileges should be mapped to his/her current role and responsibility
- Governance - Create detailed governance plan
- Engage your users to use (by enabling Classifieds, Blogs and Wiki)
