In the world of web site management and development, the term “redesign” may at first seem harmless, but can have far reaching implications as to what will be done to deliver a successful project.  I recently worked with a customer who was interested in redesigning various internal and external web sites for their organization.  It quickly became apparent by observing their discussion that they were asking for something much broader than an exclusively aesthetic redesign.  The word “redesign”...

Looking at web technology it is easy to feel that great business value and user productivity can be gained from creating deep, complex integrations presented through elegant user interfaces.  This could be the truth, but it is often far from it. As I have written many times on Infotechaligned – the only thing that matters is the ultimate business value that an application is delivering. The most value can be gained from even the most mundane technical solution. How does one define a great technical...

Anyone familiar with intranets knows the pain of not applying best practices to content maintenance strategies upfront in an initial deployment.  As part of a governance plan (link here) it is essential to design the maintenance strategy early on in a deployment. The pain generally becomes apparent when trying to figure out why old content exists within the intranet or how to restructure content after reorganization.  I have had the luxury of being part of many corporate intranet developments and privy to...

* Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch Community December 2007 and Portalsmag.com Organizations are beginning to recognize the value of deploying consumer Web tools to obtain basic benefits like internal knowledge sharing. This being said, they often overlook deeper benefits that the elements, and, more importantly, their methodologies of collaborative contribution can provide. Due to their ease of use, organizations can leverage these tools to allow for natural participation within their...

Enterprise software vendors now include Web 2.0-influenced product suites with blogging, wiki, and mashup functionality. Some vendors attempt to provide programmatic development tools to incorporate these new features, while others have created end user-centric authoring environments. In this exploration we address the latter of these two scenarios, in which business user empowerment allows knowledge management solutions to quickly be constructed and the barrier to effective knowledge work to drop within an...

Launching a corporate intranet or new initiative within an existing intranet requires investment in the form of labor and capital. Before allocating time and resource to deliver a project, wouldn’t it be nice to understand if it has an opportunity to contribute positively by adding business value? Fortunately, achieving intranet project success from a business standpoint does not have to be a guessing game. Over a series of various online community and corporate intranet deployments, heuristics have...

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime” -Chinese proverb If you have never read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people you are missing out – especially when it comes to making the most out of an investment in portal. Specifically, I am referring to the concepts of stewardship delegation and production capacity, both of which can be developed through an educational curriculum and guidelines aimed at empowering business users....

If you were going to live a house, wouldn’t you want it to be built on top of a solid foundation that underwent periodic inspection? For whatever reason it may be easy to get the impression that a particular technology platform will inherently take care of governing portal deployments. After all – mature portal platforms have security, user groups and taxonomies that a vendor indicated will help govern the content, right? Setting off on a portal deployment or adding elements into an existing...

Creating a winning recipe for an internally facing corporate portal is a daunting task. At the onset of a project there is a natural tendency to think that having a large target audience is the route to success and value. What has been found through practice though can actually be quite the opposite. Whether we are experienced with portal deployments or not, there are some fundamental dynamics that if carefully orchestrated can help to ensure a deployment’s success. When working with powerful, versatile...

The next wave driving business value via tagging is here and it is being done through creative design and deployment. At this point the value proposition of tagging enterprise artifacts by and for knowledge workers is generally understood. Given this, it begs the question as to what additional value an organization can gain if they have invested in or plan to invest in an enterprise tagging platform. With the recent release of enterprise tagging technologies our options have become even more expansive as...