If you have any part in owning or managing a SharePoint Intranet, I highly recommend Andrew Wright's Worldwide Intranet Challenge group on LinkedIn. It's an active, well-managed group with great content, and does a good job of keeping the sales pitches out of the general forum. Some of the posts are SharePoint-specific, and the vast majority of the rest deal with concepts that are platform-agnostic. Here's a sampling of some of the recent discussions:
- What are your intranet's top-level navigation links, and why?
- How much control should Intranet managers have?
- Do you highlight user-generated content anywhere on your intranet?
- What social media options are you using for internal corporate communications?
- To which business unit does an intranet belong? HR? I.T.? Communications? And why?
- Looking for an analytics tool that can't pass info to an external server... what do you recommend?
- Why aren't intranets fulfilling their potential? What do you think?
- Now that intranets have moved from a straight content publishing model to a mix with collaboration and social media tools, how do you structure an information architecture ?
This is seriously good benchmarking for the Intranet owner who has needs beyond the technical. For my day-to-day digest of what's top of mind for the community, I find this group more useful in many ways than some of the dedicated SharePoint groups. From the list of members I can see that many of the consultants and practitioners I know and respect may share my opinion. Nice work, Andrew!
