A Matter Of Degree

Pick a pic meme

20051216 - In mama's shoes, originally uploaded by sadalit.

For this morning's coffee break -

Jack Vinson at the Knowledge Jolt blog passed along these directions:

Go to your online photo service, click on the third to last page in your album, select the third picture on the page. Post and explain.

Like Jack, I interpreted "third to last" as the third page from the start of the photostream (rather than third from most recent page). In this case I don't think the photo needs any explanation (unlike some of the others on that 3rd page)...

This meme differs from other memes I was reading about online - some of which involve the fourth picture in the fourth folder and many of which involve the sixth picture in the sixth folder. I prefer these instructions because they don't include any mention of folders.

I couldn't resist checking the sixth picture on the sixth page, though, and it's a closeup of my son as a baby. Which balances the third picture very nicely in terms of my children's birth order, what my main focus was at the time, etc. Plus it's just fun to look back in a random way.

Review – the Nielsen-Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual 2009

I just finished Nielsen-Norman Group's report "Intranet Design Annual 2009 - The year's 10 Best Intranets" by Kara Pernice, Patty Caya, and Jakob Nielsen. Its 478 pages profile the 10 best intranets worldwide, providing in-depth case studies of the design process for these intranets including business cases, development team profiles, timelines, governance, training, and marketing and communication plans, challenges, successes, and lessons learned. Along the way they provide helpful tips, such as "9 Traits of a Good CEO or Management blog."

I highly recommend this report to anyone involved in an intranet project, whether it's in the design stages or already in production. There is so much to learn from these successful teams, and the designs and functionality these intranets offer are inspiring. In this post I'd like to summarize the common themes.

 

The Nielsen Norman Group saw increases in:

• size of intranet teams (while organization size is getting smaller among the winners)
• internal ownership of the intranet user experience
• executive visibility for the intranet
• viewing of the intranet as a collaboration tool that supports work processes & improves efficiency
• social networking features
• SharePoint use - Half the winners used SharePoint as a platform, starting from 0 in 2006.
• user-centered design
• personalization – of news, tools, project information, and by language/location
• focus on new employees – information dedicated to them, plus news about new arrivals shared with the rest of the organization.

 

Additional trends they indicated:

• decentralization of organizations – 2 winners have no headquarters.
• consulting sector is best-represented industry, with 3 winners.
• predominant approach is to engage one or more consultants to contribute parts of the design – six of the ten were designed this way. (the rest designed completely by in-house staff; none designed by external agency alone).

 

Trends not specifically mentioned by the Nielsen Norman Group but which I saw among the winners:

• Little optimization of these intranets for mobile use, although many mentioned this as planned for a future phase.
• Strong and frequent use of graphical elements on the pages – not just in the headers but in the content areas.
• Rounded corners on the web parts, or angled components / navigational elements
• Suggestion boxes, polls, and surveys – ways to listen to the end-user, and specific efforts made by leadership to say, "I'm listening."
• Use of horizontal tabs (but seemingly no trend around number of tabs)
• Colors: green, orange, and blue used almost exclusively (one site used a red theme, one used black/charcoal gray); with gray in the secondary palette.
• Search on every page
• Human effort - hard work and dedication to providing content (i.e., a team to publish news stories or approve content, a blogging CEO) – the consistent message being that you can't just stand it up and then abandon it.
• Informal approach – use of cartoons, humor, snapshots, fun elements
• Competitions for the end-users as a way to get employees engaged (and another example of human effort needed from the intranet team to run these and make them successful)

 

As one who works exclusively with SharePoint intranets, two details of the report were really valuable for me:

• One of the winning intranets had the "Sharepointy" look, by which I mean it used the default, out-of-box master page and blue theme throughout. This makes clear that you don't have to invest in company-specific branding to have an outstanding intranet. The content and people elements can make it great.
• One company prototyped their Intranet home page using an Excel spreadsheet. This struck me as a realistic way to make a wireframe for a SharePoint-based intranet, because SharePoint is based on data and grids rather than a more fluid look and feel (as opposed to using a graphic design program which would take SharePoint's structure and limitations less into account).

   

I'd like to hand a copy of this report to each one of my clients. Specifically I'd like them all to read the Lessons Learned section at the end of each team profile, as well as the Nielsen-Norman Group's overall "Recommendations for the Intranet Design Process" at the end of the report. (The authors also include a "what not to do" section listing reasons why intranets were not included.) It's advice that can't be emphasized enough. I'll take this information with me into my future Intranet designs, but my passing on recommendations and best practices is not as powerful as the direct experience of reading these profiles.

Issues with Manage Content and Structure Move / Copy functions in MOSS 2007

I like the convenience of using Manage Content and Structure to move batches of files from one document library to another, while maintaining their metadata (custom fields as well as metadata like "modified by" are brought over from the source library to the target library).

However, I have been seeing some strange and concerning results, mostly having to do with content types.  In a recent example, I had a library of documents with a yes/no checkbox to allow for displaying certain of the documents in a view on the home page.  Another library needed to be merged in with this one, which had the same yes/no checkbox (same column name).  I recommended that my client move the files from one library to another using Manage Content and Structure.  After she did this, she reported that the documents from the merged library were not apperaing on the home page view even though she had checked "Yes."

When I looked more closely at the document library, I saw that there were now two identical fields for the yes/no choice in the same document library.  SharePoint had copied one over and kept the original - and the values were different in each field.  (In the field properties, I saw that the system had appended "0" to one of the column names on the back-end.)

In this case, it was a simple matter of making sure all the data matched from one column to another, and then deleting the duplicate column.  But in some cases (e.g., when the Move function added the "Publishing Start Date" and "Publishing End Date" fields to a document library) I've had to switch on "Allow management of content types" and hide the extra fields that were added during the move process so that my end-users wouldn't be confused by the newly-added fields.

Consider this a word of warning - Manage Content and Structure may beat Explorer View in terms of convenience and speed when moving batches of files, but it can cause unintended outcomes that could take you more time to troubleshoot and fix in the long run.