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)

Posted in: Best Practices, Intranet, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010