Why Publishing Duplicate Information on an Intranet (or anywhere) is Bad Practice

An intranet is a private network that is used within an organization to share information and resources. It’s an important tool for improving communication and collaboration, but it can also become cluttered and confusing if the information is not managed properly.

One common issue with intranets is the publication of duplicate information. This can cause a number of problems and make it tough for employees to find the information they need.

Here are a six reasons why publishing duplicate information on an intranet is a bad practice:

1. Costly Legal Issues: Employees using outdated documentation such as policies or contracts.
2. Confusion and Inconsistency: When there are multiple copies of the same information on an intranet, it can cause confusion and inconsistency. Employees may not be sure which version of the information is correct or up-to-date, leading to misunderstandings and mistakes.
3. Searchability: Duplicate information can make it harder for employees to find the information they need, as search results will contain multiple copies of the same information. This can lead to frustration and cause employees to waste time searching for the information they need.
4. Increased Maintenance: Duplicate information means that the same information must be updated and maintained in multiple places, which is time-consuming and increases the risk of errors. It’s much more efficient to manage information in a single, centralized location.
5. Waste of Storage Space: Duplicate information takes up valuable storage space, which can be a problem if the intranet is running low on space. By reducing the number of duplicates, organizations can free up space and improve performance.
6. Poor User Experience: Duplicate information can have a negative impact on the user experience, making it difficult for employees to find the information they need and causing frustration. This can lead to a decrease in employee engagement and productivity.

How to Prevent & Monitor Duplicate Content

Organizations should take steps to manage their intranet content effectively and avoid publishing duplicate information to ensure employees have access to the information they need, when they need it.

To audit for duplicates, two steps would be creating a script that search for duplicates and then notifying the colleagues who last modified the files to address.

Microsoft announced a new employee experience platform called “Microsoft Viva” in early February 2021. According to Microsoft, this platform brings the following tools in a single place, Microsoft Teams.

• Employee engagement (Viva Connections)
• Wellbeing (Viva Insights)
• Learning (Viva Learning)
• Knowledge discovery (Viva Topics)

What is Viva Connections?

The “Viva Connections app” is the central landing page consisting of a personalized company news feed, company resources, general dashboard view, which allows you to stay engaged and informed no matter where you work. Technically, Viva Connections is built on SharePoint, which allows you to extend your SharePoint intranet content into Microsoft Teams with a modern employee experience.

The Viva Connections for desktop experience was formerly known as the Home site app.

The Viva Connections enables users to discover and search relevant content, sites, and news from across the organization right from the Team’s app bar.

Viva Connections Requirements

Viva Connections offers Global Navigation to highlight specific resources and personalized content like sites and news. Global navigation is configured in SharePoint and can be accessed by selecting the icon in the Teams app bar.

It is recommended that Global Navigation is enabled and customized in the SharePoint app bar.

Viva Connections Recommendations

• Use the SharePoint Home site as the landing experience
• Only modern SharePoint sites and pages can be viewed in Teams, and all other content will open in a browser

When is Viva Connections Available?

The Viva Connections app for Teams became generally available to all customers on March 31, 2021. The mobile experience for Viva Connections will be available in Teams in the summer of 2021.

Steps to Deploy Viva Connections

1. Set up a SharePoint Home site
2. Enable Global Navigation
3. Create a Viva Connections app package in PowerShell
   • Download and run the PowerShell script linked below to create the Viva Connections desktop package.
   • Download the Viva Connections for desktop PowerShell script
4. When you create a new package in PowerShell, you will be required to complete the following fields:
   • URL of your tenant’s home site: Provide the tenant’s home site URL starting with “https://”. This site will become the default landing experience for Viva Connections.

• • Name: The name of your Viva Connections desktop package, as it should appear in the Teams app bar.

• • App short description (80 characters): A short description for your app will appear in the Teams app catalog.

• • App long description (4000 characters): A long description for your app will appear in the Teams app catalog.

• • Privacy policy: The privacy policy for custom Teams apps in your organization (needs to start with https://). If you do not have a separate privacy policy, press “Enter,” and the script will use Microsoft’s default SharePoint privacy policy.

• • Terms of use: The terms of use for custom Teams apps in your organization (needs to start with https://). If you do not have separate terms of use, press “Enter,” and the script will use Microsoft’s default SharePoint terms of use.

• • Company name: Your organization name will be visible on the app page in the Teams app catalog in the “Created By” section.

• • Company website: Your company’s public website (needs to start with https://) linked to your company’s app name on the app page in the Teams app catalog in the “Created By” section.

• • Icons: You are required to provide two PNG icons, which will be used to represent your Viva Connections desktop app in Teams
    • 192X192 pixel colored icon for the Teams app catalog
    • 32X32 pixel monochrome icon for Teams app bar.

Learn more about Teams icon guidelines.

5. Upload the Viva Connections desktop package in the Teams Admin Center: Once you successfully provide the details, a Teams app manifest, which is a .zip file, will be created and saved on your device. The Teams administrator of your tenant will then need to upload this app manifest to Teams admin center > Manage apps.

Learn more about how to upload custom apps in the Teams admin center.

6.  Manage and pin the app by default for your users: Once the Viva Connections desktop package is successfully uploaded in the Teams admin center, it can be managed like any other app.

You can configure user permissions to make this app available to the right set of users. Permitted users can then find this app in the Teams app catalog.

Pin this app by default for users in your tenant so that they can easily access their company’s intranet resources without having to discover the app in the Teams app catalog.

Use Teams app setup policies to pin this app by default in the Teams app bar and then apply this policy to a batch of users.

Here is how Viva Connections will look like in your Teams Desktop app.

Orrick, a global law firm, needed to update its internal portal site to create a more efficient way to deliver content to employees. With that in mind, Orrick partnered with Perficient Digital on a new content management system that would allow the firm to create more value for attorneys and employees through an integrated, personalized experience. The resulting portal site has been recognized by the 2019 WebAwards for Portal Standard of Excellence. 

Work & Results

The portal was created on the Sitecore platform and focused on role-based personalization to create “personas” that would deliver appropriate content to the employee logged on, whether it be secretary, associate, partner, or staff. This, along with advanced content management, created easier access to client and matter pages. The advanced features of the intranet led to the team being recognized for outstanding achievement in web development. 
“We have had amazing feedback and adoption from attorneys and staff because we focused on the user experience,” explains Scott Mortenson, Orrick’s intranet owner. “We concentrated our efforts on personalization, usability, and search. The extra effort to find out what users are looking for most often and delivering that information clearly has paid off.”

The Team

• Product Owner, Orrick: Scott Mortenson
• Project Manager, Orrick: Doug Whitecotton
• Developer, Orrick: Scott Timberlake
• Developer, Orrick: Jeremy Sinclair
• Developer, Orrick: Mark Infantino
• Developer, Orrick: Rick Gatrell
• Developer, Orrick: Douglas Whitecotton
• Developer, Orrick: Chris DeFrank
• Developer, Orrick: Joe Michalo
• Developer, Orrick: Wendy Attenberger
• Developer, Orrick: Dan McConaughey
• Developer, Orrick: Jonathan Dent
• Project Manager, Perficient Digital: TL Stephanchick
• Senior Solutions Architect, Perficient Digital: Scott Stocker
• Senior Solutions Architect, Perficient Digital: Nick Sturdivant
• Technical Consultant, Perficient Digital: Zach Gay
• Technical Consultant, Perficient Digital: Maria Xavier
• Director, Perficient Digital: Matt Connolly
• Senior Technical Consultant, Perficient Digital: Mike Ball
• Principal, CX Platforms, Perficient Digital: Stephen Tynes

Both teams worked diligently to make this portal best in class for user experience. Scott Mortenson from Orrick and Scott Stocker from Perficient Digital will be presenting this award-winning work at Sitecore Symposium on November 5. Tweet us and let us know if you will be in attendance and have any questions for the speakers!

A great customer experience (CX) doesn’t necessarily begin with your customer-facing website. More and more companies today are shifting their focus and evaluating all that goes into a great CX. If you take a step back and think about what’s critical to delivering a top-notch customer experience, the employee experience and similarly, employee engagement, are very likely to be on your short-list. 
Sometimes, to raise the proverbial bar (the customer-facing bar, of course), you have to put in the work for your employees. Ultimately, enriching your employee experience through an improved intranet drives a better CX. The more engaged your employees are in their work, the apter they are to contribute to your organization’s success. Similarly, giving employees access to information, data, and insights spawns engagement and empowerment. 
According to a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit, this notion leads to a concerted effort within an organization to ensure “mobile-first” policies are in place, and improvement of collaboration tools. The ability to work from anywhere is nearly as important as access to information. One area to apply these efforts is often the company intranet. 

Orrick Looks Within for External Results 

One great example of a global law firm did just that, honing in on the corporate intranet, is Orrick. The intranet design stemmed from the desire for a quicker and more efficient way of managing and distributing information internally to meet clients’ needs. Over time and due to increased business demand, Orrick’s intranet experienced tremendous growth. It had expanded to include thousands of pages, reports, and business applications.
Our work with Orrick began by identifying personas and job titles across the company to establish a personalized web page for each person who would log into the intranet. This, along with advanced content management, created easier access to client and matter pages. Another large piece of this process was integrating intelligent search functionality. The new functionality included predictive search which would provide users with results as they type. Not only that, but the new site is mobile responsive for 24/7 access. 
Choosing the Sitecore platform was integral for the role-based personalization of their intranet. It allowed for personalization based on the employee’s position, whether it be secretary, associates, partners, or staff. The four personas see completely different views of many of the pages on the intranet. Sitecore’s rule-based personalization capabilities were vital to enabling this key feature of Orrick’s intranet.

Award-Winning Results and Knowledge Sharing

This work with Orrick was recently recognized by the 2019 WebAwards for Portal Standard of Excellence. The award was given by the Web Marketing Association for outstanding achievement in web development. With the help of Sitecore’s advanced content management system and all-in-one capabilities, you too can enhance your intranet with award-winning functionality in a way that drives employees to use it on a regular basis. 
We are proud of our work with Orrick and have partnered with their team to show you just that. To receive more information about how you can transform your business with an intuitive, robust intranet, visit our session at Sitecore Symposium this year on November 5 at 1:30 PM ET.

Did you know Pepsi’s intranet name is “My PepsiCo?” Or that AT&T’s is “Access?” As a company grows, the employee base’s need to streamline communication, as well as share knowledge and consumer business information in a secure place, increases. Hence, the intranet: A single source or a destination where employees can login to connect and stay up to date.
An intranet stands as a way for a company to communicate with its employees, post-critical (as well as fun) information, facilitate searching and the use of team and project documents, and serve as an all-around go-to destination for finding purposeful, curated content. The intranet should reinforce the brand, emphasize the corporate commitment, and support the organization’s culture. All of these objectives should factor into the selection of an intranet name.
Approaching intranet name selection from the perspective of content strategy, companies can draw inspiration for naming an intranet based on all that it communicates to its employees— so, begin with the end-user in mind. Think about or actually create a list of the types of content employees will be able to access, such as training videos, the events calendar, news, critical announcements, or policy documents. Associate the intranet name with the content while keeping your company’s brand top-of-mind.
Intranets often hold vast amounts of content. Consider these best practices when establishing a name that balances content with the brand:

1. Know the purpose

Think about the outcome for employees who use the intranet. How do you want your employees to feel when they use the intranet? How quickly will they find the information they seek?

2. Stay on brand

Align with the company identity to make sure employees connect with the name. Balance the brand essence with the utility of the intranet. What is your voice and tone? How do you approach writing for your employees?

3. Draw people in

Make sure your intranet is a destination that lives up to its purpose. What are employees seeking when they visit? How often do they visit? What are the key types of information they are looking for?

4. One team

Strengthen your corporate culture by increasing the identity within the company walls. How do internal communications enable intranet use?

5. Be human

Help employees identify with the intranet as a team helper. What is its persona? What does this team helper facilitate?

6. Keep it simple

Avoid names that lengthen when spelled out in its complete state. Are the employees used to acronyms? Is the acronym easy to understand?

7. Make it stick

Practice saying the name in sentences to make sure people are comfortable referencing it for its purpose. How will people refer to the intranet? E.g. “Is the training course available on [the intranet name]?” and “I uploaded the document to our [intranet name] team folder.”

8. Explore the industry

If there is common language within the industry that employees connect with, consider exploring those terms as a name. What terminology is uniquely used within your company walls or in your industry?
Taking the time to create an intranet name that resonates with employees and supports corporate objectives will encourage employee engagement— and maybe you’ll come up with something as fun as Charles Schwab Corp.’s “Schweb.”
Check out this list for more examples of corporate intranet names.

A common intranet requirement is the ability to personalize the user’s experience by targeting relevant content to them. This is an area where out of the box SharePoint functionality is limited. That process is now much easier with the release of Rise 2.5, which allows you to manage how content is tagged with core metadata and target content to users based on matching their user profile properties and personal preferences.

In order to create a truly personalized experience we require two things: content and a user profile tagged with relevant metadata.

Core Metadata

The process begins by determining the Core Metadata fields for your organization. These Core Metadata fields are those that matter most to your organization and will apply to both content and the user profile. Determination of Core Metadata fields often begins with an examination of the User Profile and Information Architecture of your portal.

Determining the available data in the user profile and how content owners wish to segment audiences. We find that most organizations will identify between 2 and 5 metadata fields that they consider “Core”. For our example, we will target content based on Department, Location, and Job Title.

Content Tagging

Tagging of content is critical to the ability to target for individual users. Once the Core Metadata fields are determined and configured, Rise provisions these fields to all relevant content types such as News, Pages, Calendar Items, Documents, and more. Content tagging provides context to the content and determines the relevancy of content for individual users.

Figure 1: Core Metadata fields on a Calendar Item

User Properties and Preferences

For optimal results, it is important to have clean data in the User Profile. Organizations often need to perform data cleanup in Active Directory before populating data to the User Profile. For example, it is common to see multiple variations of Department names in the User Profile such as Information Technologies or IT. These types of inconsistencies will make it more difficult to target content effectively. There are often circumstances where a user may want to expand the content targeted to them beyond the values in their User Profile. We can accomplish this by introducing User Preferences. Rise enables the ability to store User Preferences enabling content targeting based on User Profile and User Preferences. For example, as a user in the Human Resources I may also be interested in seeing content from Corporate Communications and Finance, two departments that I work closely with. Based on my User Profile I will have Human Resources content targeted to me, I can then expand the targeting scope by setting a User Preference for Corporate Communication and Finance. The Rise My Profile view allows users to easily manage their User Preferences and maintain some aspects of their User Profile

.

Figure 2: My Profile screen showing User Profile and Preferences

Using Content Targeting

Now that we have content tagged with Core Metadata, reliable User Profile data, and User Preferences we can begin targeting content to users. Rise 2.5 supports two types of content targeting Ranking and Filtering. Ranking leverages SharePoint Search to give more weight or priority to items that match the user’s Profile or Preferences. Items that match more closely will appear at the top of the results increasing their visibility.

To use the Ranking method in Rise set the Sort By: to the User Relevance sorting method. The “Search result priority:” can then be set for each Core Metadata value. The “Search result priority:” is a value from 0 to 10, the higher the value the greater weight the Core Metadata value adds to the content prioritization while a value of 0 means that the value will not be considered. In addition, the content editor may choose to “Prefer User Profile over User Preferences”. When this checkbox is set, User Profile property values carry more weight than User Preferences.

Figure 3: Configure Ranking for Rise Web Part

Filtering works with both Search and List based queries to filter out values that do not match the User Profile or Preferences. The filtering options are highly flexible allowing the content editor to specify placeholders for User value (User Profile), User preferences, and Page value (the current page metadata). In addition specific values can be selected as well. In the example below, content tagged with “All Locations” will be returned as well as items matching the User Profile and Preferences. This is a great way to provide location specific content for a user.

Figure 4: Configure Filtering for Rise Web Parts

The Ranking and Filtering methods can be used together or separately to enable very advanced content targeting abilities. Content targeting is available for all Rise web parts that utilize Search or List data opening up a wide array of capabilities for targeted user content. The below example shows the result of content targeting for two different users. In the examples below the first example shows a member of the Human Resources department, the second example shows a member of the Marketing department. The Recent News web part shows content targeted to the individual users based on their User Profile values.

Figure 5: End user content targeting example for Human Resources user.

Figure 6: End user content targeting example for Marketing user.

Testing Content Targeting

As you can see Rise 2.5 enables a multitude of advanced content targeting capabilities. It is important for content authors to have the ability to test that content is being targeted appropriately. It would be very difficult to force content authors to update their personal User Profile properties in order to test content targeting, and in some organizations, this may not be possible due to restrictive policies. Rise 2.5 includes a Personalization Testing page that allows authorized individuals to override their User Profile and Preference values without modifying the underlying values. This enables content authors to simulate browsing content as another user matching their criteria. The example below demonstrates the ability to override the User Profile and Preferences value. Overrides are persistent during the user’s session or until the overrides are reset.

Figure 7: Personalization testing page for Rise 2.5

Rise 2.5 now offers a complete solution for content targeting and personalization. Get in touch with us to schedule a demo of the content targeting features and other enterprise portal features available with Rise.

Perficient is pleased to announce the availability of Rise 2.5 for SharePoint. Rise Intranet is an advanced platform for delivering modern intranet and portal experiences for Office 365, SharePoint Online, and SharePoint On Premises. Rise 2.5 is packed with new features, many of which our customers have requested.

New Features

The latest Rise 2.5 release represents an important evolution in the product capabilities introducing advanced capabilities such as:

Core Metadata

Core metadata allows you to specify metadata values common to content and the user profile which can be used to influence content targeting and personalization.

Content Targeting and Personalization

Rise Web Parts that utilize Search and List Data now have the ability to target content based on the user’s profile and preferences.

Localization

Rise 2.5 allows for translation of Page Content, Menus, Web Part Titles. Support is provided for automated and manual translations in over 50 languages.

Additional Features

• Rollup Pages – New page layouts and web parts supporting generalized rollups of content pages. For example: Programs, Initiatives, etc.
• Site Tagging – leverages the Core Metadata features to allow tagging of Site Collections with key metadata values.
• Favorites – User favorites have been refactored to allow categorization of favorites and an new “All Favorites” view.
• Modern Provisioning – Allows for the creation of Site Collections based on approved templates.
• Analytics (Beta) – Rise 2.5 introduces a lightweight analytics platform to identify usage of Rise components and page popularity. This feature is in beta and will evolve over time.
• Directory Search – new web part enabling quick search of Rise Directories
• My Profile – new application page that shows a basic view of the user’s Delve profile including the ability to edit a subset of properties and configure personalization values based on Core Metadata settings.
• Sharing Buttons – a new web part that allows integration of Print/Email/Favorite/Alert buttons on any Rise page.
• Yammer Share – a new web part allowing page sharing through Yammer

In addition to all of the items listed above there are over 20+ Improvements to existing features and 400+ fixes and updates.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts highlighting the newest Rise 2.5 features or contact us today for a personalized demonstration.

Today’s intranet portals serve many purposes, from corporate communications to collaboration and business productivity. But more and more organizations are beginning to look for ways to modernize their intranet platforms and provide a richer, more collaborative end user experience.

Here are three ways that organizations today are modernizing intranet platforms:

• Knowledge Management – rapid advances in technologies, including the internet, have resulted in a virtual waterfall of data and information being shared across organizations. Leveraging your intranet platform as a central foundation for housing and sharing this information enables a more collaborative experience for end users. Your intranet platform can be used to share information vital and important to all employees. It can also be used to facilitate knowledge sharing across departments. You may already be using your intranet to share corporate-driven messages or information such as healthcare benefits or employee handbooks. But think about enabling employees from other areas such as IT or marketing to share relevant and timely information too. IT could use the intranet to create a wiki page explaining how employees can navigate an upcoming system upgrade. Or perhaps marketing publishes a blog post about an upcoming advertising campaign, so employees can share with customers or partners. Today’s intranet portals make it easier for end users to publish their own content. They also improve the ability to effectively curate and search content, making that information easier to find. These features are driving more organizations to enable knowledge management as a core intranet feature.
• Team Collaboration –  yet another area of tremendous growth throughout organizations today is workplace collaboration. Effective collaboration tools enable your employees to easily communicate across departments, office locations or even remotely. A study by Stanford several years ago showed that collaboration can have a positive impact on employee performance. With modern intranet features such as message boards, discussion forums, live chats and status updates, your intranet portal can be the gateway to dynamic employee interactions. They can help connect employees across departments or even across continents. Intranet portals can also serve as a virtual project management tool. Project or department-specific sites enable key stakeholders to work together collaboratively on projects, regardless of their location. This improves business productivity by negating the need for face-to-face interactions or calls to keep projects moving. Today’s intranet portal should serve to connect your mobile, and often global, workforce. It should be as nimble as your organization. This is why forward-thinking companies are leveraging their intranet portal to better equip employees to connect from anywhere, anytime.
• Portal for Company Tools – by deploying some of the features above, your intranet portal will serve as a virtual hub for employee communications and collaboration. A place where employees can search and locate the information they’re looking for. Or share expertise and knowledge with colleagues across the organization. By providing a reliable and enhanced experience, employees will rely on the intranet as vital to their day-to-day work. This is why leading organizations today are also leveraging their intranet as a gateway to business-critical tools, applications and processes. Bringing these tools together through your intranet enables end users to connect to their entire digital workplace from a single point.

While these are some of the top ways that organizations are evolving their intranet, they are not the only ways. Increasingly, more and more organizations are seeking to leverage advanced features to ensure their intranet delivers more value. To learn more about portal trends and best practices, download our recently published guide, “Trends in Intranet Modernization” by clicking here or by filling out the form below.

In today’s diverse working environment, organizations face a challenge of providing systems that cater to a diverse audience. We’ve previously discussed this trend in our series of blog posts, “Anatomy of a Modern Intranet”. By 2020, there will be five generations active in the workplace. All with different work styles and comfort with technology solutions. It is vitally important to understand these differing audiences in order to engage users and drive adoption. Understanding our audience allows us to cater to their individuality and create an inclusive user experience. We thought it would be fun to examine some personality types that you will encounter on your journey to a modern intranet or digital workplace.

Here are four personality types for the modern intranet:

The individuals depicted here are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons within your organization is purely intentional.

1. Newspaper and Coffee Browser
There is something about sipping a cup of coffee and flipping through the newspaper that can be incredibly relaxing. Likewise, many of your users will feel similarly about your intranet. They will take the opportunity to read the latest news and information over their morning cup of “joe”. For this group, the focus is on building a portal that provides a positive user experience.

For these users, it is important to have a continuous stream of fresh and interesting content to peruse. Make content engaging with the inclusion of photos and video media. This will create a compelling experience that will bring these users back for more.

2. Catch me if you can
There will be subsets of your user population that will resist every effort to lure them to the intranet, perhaps missing vital information in the process. For these users, it may be necessary to leverage a multi-channel communication approach. Engage this user base through email newsletters, push notifications, and even offline methods such as posters and elevator message boards.

To convert these users it is important that your additional communication channels validate the intranet as a source of reliable information. Over time, these users will become accustomed to seeking information directly from the source.

3. Social Butterfly
The social butterfly values the ability to participate in a conversation as an active participant over a one-sided content delivery system. These users provide comments and feedback and often share your message with others in their circles.

Engage these users by enabling them to leave comments and feedback, as well as inviting them to rate and share content. Every organization has social butterflies, if your technology is not enabling this set of users, you are likely missing valuable organizational insights.

4. Just the facts
These users have many demands on their time and attention. Rather than browsing and discovering new content, they wish to find answers to their specific questions. These users are more likely to use search over navigation to find the content they seek. They appreciate content that is organized logically and the power of a good summary. They will spend less time on the site, therefore the time they do spend should be productive.

To appeal to these users, you’ll want to spend time honing your site’s navigation and search experiences. The site navigation should be logical and easily understood by the majority of users. Task-based menu approaches are more effective than menus that follow strict organizational hierarchies. Focus on providing an excellent search experience and curation of search results for commonly used search terms.

Impossible to please everyone

In designing your modern intranet experience, it is impossible to please everyone. Focusing on your users and the trends of how your users and organization are changing will provide valuable insights on how to reach your audience effectively. The realization that there will be many types of users and a variety of engagement styles will allow you to focus on the strategies that work better within your organization.

Perficient, modern workplace partner

At Perficient, we are experts in the modern workplace, building intranet and digital workplace solutions that enable users to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Our modern intranet and portal solution, Rise is purpose-built to deliver engaging user experiences on the Office 365 platform. Our blend of enterprise software solutions along with expert consulting services allow our customers to achieve long-term success. If you are interested in learning more about how Perficient can help you modernize your intranet, reach out to us today.

Those of us in the business of building corporate intranets have long battled against people’s tendencies to work in isolation or “silos”. Our goal is to create intranet and collaboration sites where people work in an open and transparent manner, and information is accessible, enabling better decision-making and productivity. Many intranet and collaboration tools such as Wikis, Enterprise Social, and Blogs, support this working approach.

While I still support working transparently and breaking down barriers to communication, this style of working has also resulted in a huge increase in the amount of content that organizations are producing.

Not all data is equal

More data and content can be good, however not all data is created equal. The newly found ease of content creation has led to an enterprise-scale episode of the show “Hoarders”. Look beyond the pristine lobbies of most organizations, and you are likely to see piles of documents and data collecting digital cobwebs. All this content presents some unique challenges:

1. Data (or content) is duplicated in too many places, there is no single source of truth
2. Data (or content) is difficult to search or locate
3. It is difficult or impossible to determine if content is reliable

Do these sound familiar? Then your organization is likely not realizing the full value of your content and data. Here is the impact on your end users:

• Everyday user: more noise, it is harder to locate the correct content when needed
• Knowledge manager: more hay to dig through to find the needle in the haystack, in the form of best practices and insights
• System administrator: more infrastructure, management, and governance requirements

In order to realize the full potential of your content and data, we need to carefully analyze it, understand trends, extract best practices, and socialize organizational knowledge in a structured and logical way.

Protect your content with data silos

In the past, we’ve viewed silos negatively. They meant groups working apart, with little knowledge of what the other was doing. This led to wasted effort and, in some cases, toxic work cultures. But it is time to rethink how we view silos. A physical silo is a tool used to store and protect valuable goods in isolation. Think about the farmer who uses a silo to store his wheat crop. They spend hours separating the wheat from the chaff, discarding what has no value and storing the final product in a silo, until it can be used or brought to market.

Achieve balance with data silos

It is possible to achieve a balance between breaking down organizational silos while benefiting from creating data silos. By adopting what I have termed “SAFE” data habits, you can fully realize the value of open and transparent work styles and collaboration. SAFE stands for Store, Analyze, Frame and Expose. Here is the breakdown of this important acronym:

• Store – Provide tools and infrastructure that allow your users to store data and collaborate effectively. Platforms and data storage are becoming easier to deploy as a result of more companies moving to cloud based platforms such as Office 365. Store, classify, and properly govern data. Allow useless data to expire and elevate useful data. This Brings us to our next element:
• Analyze – Data for data’s sake is not a winning strategy, since data alone provides no insights. Systematically review data, extract valuable knowledge, formalize and share it with the rest of the organization. Do not assume that knowledge will spread organically throughout your company. Your employees are wasting time wading through data, attempting to make sense of the chaos. Once you have separated your digital wheat (knowledge) from the chaff (noise), it is time to move to the next step:
• Frame – Organize data in logical structures that provides business context through categorization and tagging. This elevates valuable data above the noise, proclaiming it officially sanctioned knowledge, best practice, and worth sharing. Now get the data to the people:
• Expose – Make the data accessible and easy to find for end users by delivering content through portal platforms such as SharePoint Online. Choose platforms that allow you to produce information hierarchies and enable user’s ability to effectively search. This official content is set apart (silo’d) and easily distinguishable from less relevant data.

Realize the potential of your intranet data

Organizations that adopt these practices can expect:

• Users to find the answers they seek
• A culture that recognizes and fosters expertise
• Communities with active and focused collaboration
• An increase in data-driven decision-making

At Perficient, we build solutions that work within your company culture to deliver measurable results. Our experts have a deep understanding of Office 365 and the digital workplace. We provide consulting services and products that enable your workforce to achieve more. Our award winning Microsoft practice is widely recognized as one of the top in the business. Our Rise intranet service delivers a modern experience for SharePoint Online out of the box. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help your organization practice SAFE data habits.

You can learn more about portal best practices by downloading our recently published guide, “Trends in Intranet Modernization” by clicking here or by filling out the form below.

Employees are using mobile devices more than ever before and are likely accessing important information from intranets via tablets and smart phones. This creates a number of challenges when intranets have been designed for optimal use with desktops resulting in a poor user experience and low adoption for employees accessing intranets via mobile devices.

Mobile first is therefore no longer a choice but an imperative if you wish for your intranet to remain the go-to source for key information. By adopting a mobile first approach you can ensure you:

• Support the increasing mobile clinical workforce so that your employees can access the intranet remotely and from any device
• Meet the informational needs of various internal audiences with engaging content that aligns with the device they are on
• Deliver a positive user experience with enhanced functionality
• Support all employees regardless of which device they use with a responsive website design that is mobile-optimized

Redesigning your intranet with a mobile first approach will ensure increased user adoption and increased clinician mobility. Securely improving mobility will lead to improved clinician workflows and result in better patient outcomes.

What steps are you taking to transform into a truly mobile healthcare provider?

The digital workplace is undergoing a transformation, but company intranets are often left behind.
Many organizations struggle to provide an engaging intranet experience, and many traditional intranet projects fail to meet organizational objectives. According to Gartner, “Since the emergence of the intranet in the mid-1990s, organizations have seen wave after wave of intranet failure, renewal, stagnancy, and failure once again.” Not only has the intranet been a singular failure within many organizations, it also has been a repeated failure. In the same report, Gartner states, “Enterprises that fail to adapt their intranet strategies will be swept into the next wave of intranet failure.”

During the last decade, SharePoint has emerged as the de-facto intranet platform, and Office 365 has gained significant traction within organizations of all sizes. In fact, SharePoint intranets have accounted for a majority of the top-ranked intranets during the last two years, and many organizations are migrating to Office 365 from their on-premises installations. How can we reconcile these successes when considering Gartner’s reports of intranet failure? Is technology the problem?
In this guide, you’ll learn our approach to the modern SharePoint intranet. By understanding why outdated intranets fail, you’ll learn tips for launching a successful modern intranet, including key focus areas, critical components, and more. We will look at what the modern intranet means in the context of today’s digital workplace and the Office 365 platform, and finally we’ll talk about how Perficient’s approach to the modern intranet can benefit your organization and finally deliver the intranet your employees deserve.