10 Best Practices to improve Intranet for better user involvement

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

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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
8. User Privileges
•  Identify user permissions based on roles and responsibilities
• Privileges should be mapped to his/her current role and responsibility
9. Governance - Create detailed governance plan
10. Engage your users to use (by enabling Classifieds, Blogs and Wiki)

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Sharepoint 2007 Alerts are not working

Finally I managed to resolve this problem in my case.

Issue:
We have implemented a MOSS solution which contains a few custom lists. We have also configured alerts and customized them to suit the customer’s requirements.

Alerts were working fine but about suddenly they stopped working for one particular list. Alerts are working for all other lists/document libraries/etc. without any issues. If we check the content DB of MOSS, we can see the alerts are getting created successfully. But the emails are not being sent. We get confirmation emails that a new alert has been created, so message flow seems solid.

So, I then took a backup (by creating a List template with content), and recreated a new list with the same data and configuration. Alerts are working fine in the new list which has the same configuration and data. But with this approach we will lose Created/Modified and Author/Editor details.

Solution:

So, to resolve this issue I restarted the SPTimerV3 service (windows SharePoint timer), restarted IIS in all the servers. Thought this will resolve alerts issue. But no luck. Also, rebooted the machine (I know it doesn't make any sense but we wanted to try it) “

So, did google search and tried all the options provided in the following articles.... Also, contacted Microsoft support to help us out on this. But they are not sure about the problem.

http://weblogs.asp.net/mellota/archive/2007/10/11/sharepoint-2007-task-notification-alert-emails-not-working.aspx
http://www.moss2007.be/blogs/vandest/archive/2007/11/23/sharepoint-immediate-alert-notifications-stopped-working.aspx
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2150023&SiteID=1
http://suguk.org/forums/thread/6756.aspx
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mindykelly/archive/2007/08/01/alerts-not-working-in-moss.aspx

As none of the option above help me to resolve the problem. So, thought of deleting the list and recreating list by losing out Created/Modified and Author/Editor details. But to my luck, I wanted to try removing all the alerts in the portal and test.

So, I created an application which will allow to take backup/restore all the alerts in the portal. After taking backup of all the alerts in the portal. I deleted all the alerts and then created one sample alert and tested, to my luck Alerts started working without any issue.

So, I restored all the alerts back without any issue. Now Alerts are being sent from the "troubled" list. Looks to you bit silly. But it is true... if you are working on MOSS 2007, be prepared for these kind of issues.

I hope this post will help someone, as I spent many frustrating days to resolve this issue.

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SharePoint Customization

Here is the procedure to customize Multiline text box and Multi select box in MOSS 2007.

• To increase the size of Multiline textbox, modify width in .ms-long class.

If you want only modify in one page then add a content editor Webpart in the page and place the following code inside.

This will change only in that particular page. If you want this change to apply for the entire portal then modify Core.css file.

• To increase the height and width of Multiple selection list box. Then you have to modify “SPHtmlSelect_Adjust” function in

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\GroupedItemPicker.js”.

function SPHtmlSelect_Adjust(oSelect)

{

var oDiv=oSelect.parentNode;

if (oDiv.tagName !="DIV")

return;

if (oSelect.options.length <>

oSelect.size=20;

else

oSelect.size=oSelect.options.length;

var widthDiv=oDiv.clientWidth;

var widthSel=oSelect.offsetWidth;

if (widthSel <>

{

oSelect.style.width=widthDiv+"px";

}

if (oSelect.selectedIndex <>

return;

var pos=Math.round((oSelect.selectedIndex * oDiv.scrollHeight / oSelect.size));

if (pos <>

{

oDiv.scrollTop=pos;

}

else if (pos > Math.round(oDiv.scrollTop+oDiv.clientHeight - (oDiv.scrollHeight / oSelect.size)))

{

oDiv.scrollTop=Math.round(pos - oDiv.clientHeight+(oDiv.scrollHeight / oSelect.size));

}

}

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