Intranet Blog

Interact continues to lead the field in intelligent intranet software.  This intelligence combined with the easiest interface in the marketplace and new enterprise 2.0 tools helps organisations promote best practice and reduce duplication of effort.

Interact 4.6 includes many new features and tools to improve productivity, collaboration, communication and knowledge management.  We recently conducted a survey of the users of Interact and many of these requests are included in version 4.6.

Read more about these features in what’s new in version 4.6 >>

Collaborative Staff Directory
One of the most exciting areas of new development is a new collaborative element to the staff directory.  This incorporates more powerful Enterprise Networking tools in addition to all the previous intelligent features.

It actively promotes internal communication, collaboration, idea sharing and cross participation by using facebook/Linkedin style micro-posts and news feeds. These two new concepts live alongside each other in the central column of the page. It allows staff to post their ideas, sites and documents, submit suggestions to each other, comment on others ideas and suggestions as well as view what another staff member is working on via their status update. This can increase productivity by giving users a method for receiving fast, efficient answers to their questions.

Benefits include;

• Clearer layout – with no wasted space – more items clickable
• Easier and more flexible way to collaborate on documents
• Unify all departments / business units
• Replace email for intra-office communication – great way to share nuggets of information
• Stay up-to-date with others and what is happening in your organisation
• Ask questions and get answers from people quickly
• Reduce duplication of effort as everyone is in the loop

Within the status update we have also incorporated the ‘Clever Linker’ – giving users the ability to intelligently link to other objects on the intranet such as staff members, articles and forms.

The Clever Linker is a popular feature in Interact. When you hover over a staff member or follower their business card details, such as name, dept, phone number etc, are displayed making it easier for you to retrieve their contact details, improving communication and collaboration. 
 
Within the new enhanced Staff Directory page you are also able to post comments directly to other members of staff, simply by clicking on their profile and selecting ‘Only this person’ in the messaging board. This allows you to have a direct conversation with the individual without it being posted on their wall for everyone to see.

As with everything in Interact all of the content on the new profile page is searchable under Interact’s Intelligent Search, so you can be confident that the knowledge stored here can be retrieved in the future.

Read more about these features in what’s new in version 4.6 >>

Interact has loads of hidden secrets (not that we are trying to hide all these things – it is just that we have so much to shout about some of the smaller things that make a big difference get missed).  So – in an effort to showcase those small things – here are 3 little gems in interact

Show a style sheet based on the IP address

We realised very early on that people in the same organisation have different needs and requirements from their Intranet.  Interact goes a long way to ensure that it promotes the correct information to the correct people with things like Interact recommends, personalised homepages and My widget.  However, sometimes it isn’t just about getting the correct content to the correct people but how that content is delivered.

Interact allows you to set a stylesheet based on an IP range

Stylesheets in Interact can be tailored to department, group and individual needs.  We have for some years provided stylesheets for accessibility for colour blind, visually impaired and dyslexic users and now have added the ability to tailor a stylesheet based on an IP address range.  This can then be used to deliver low bandwidth stylesheets to people on the road or with poor connections to the Intranet.

Failure to find report

Interact’s sophisticated and unique Statistic & Search Analytics enables Interact to offer detailed analytical usage reports that show you at a glance what is, and more importantly, what isn’t, working on your intranet.
The Statistics application tracks and monitors search behaviours and results giving you a unique insight into what users are searching for and identify areas of your intranet that do not have adequate content, in effect avoiding intranet ‘black holes’.

 
Interact removes a lot of the guesswork involved by including reports such as the popular “Failure To Find” report.

Intranet Media Manager

Interact 4.0’s built-in Media Manager is an image library and more. You don't have to have image editing software on your desktop as it automatically scales large images down to more usable sizes, removing the need to have a separate image editor. Images can have keywords set against them too, for easier search and retrieval.

 
Interact’s Media Manager also allows images and videos to be uploaded and edited without the need for any ICT knowledge.

Videos are a great way to communicate a message and can be far more effective than delivering the same message in text.  As well as static images you can also upload video files to the Media Manager for use in documents or on homepages.  Having dynamic visual content is a great way to attract and engage a reader.   The Media Manager supports a variety of file formats; .swf (Flash), .wmv, .avi, .mpg and .flv.
 

 

Store video files in the Media Manager to further enhance your content and homepages.

In a recent survey conducted with our customers the following intranet applications proved to be the most popular among users.   We share them with you here so that you can check that your intranet is providing your staff with the tools that they want and need.

1. Search

When searching for something on the intranet, people want quick, accurate results.  If intranet search fails to deliver speed and accuracy then people lose confidence in it and usage drops off.

In order to provide user satisfaction intranet search needs to:

• Search all content on the intranet, including staff directory, calendars, and applications and
• Prioritise search results by, for example, popularity, date, ratings, or ‘best bets’.
• Rank search results on criteria such as popularity, date, document or content ratings

Coupled with an effective search engine, your intranet should be able to provide you with search analytics so you can see trends in what people are searching for, what searches are successful, and how many searches were not successful so you can identify missing content?

2. Staff Directory

Connecting people is an important function of a collaborative intranet.  Users expect far more than just an internal phone directory from their staff directories.  

Those that incorporate elements of the popular social networking sites with collaborative tools are the real crowd pleasers which help gain employee buy-in.  The ability for users to create blogs and share what they are working on via status updates transforms the intranet into a truly collaborative platform for better idea sharing and cross company knowledge sharing.

This sense of community is also driven by giving staff the ability to easily find colleagues with particular skills and experience, or location.  A sense of community increases employee satisfaction and encourages knowledge transfer, so it’s no surprise that the staff directory is one of the most popular applications.

3. Forms and Business Processes

Getting business processes online is a great way of keeping users coming back to the intranet.  Whether it be holiday requests or filling out expenses forms, it’s crucial that they are visible, easy to find, and quick and easy to use.

Online forms offer a simple and effective way of adding interactivity to an intranet and our customers tell us that they deliver clear productivity benefits and costs savings through time saved for both staff filling in the forms and administrative time in processing them, not to mention the money saved by eliminating the printing of paper forms.

4. Interact’s ‘My Widget’

Interact’s 'My Widget' feature gives users the ability to select the information they need themselves and therefore increase the relevancy of content.  My Widget enables users to integrate their personal favourites easily into the intranet and provides them with a shortcut to content that is interesting and relevant to them. 

This is particularly successful because it enables users to follow progress on selected content without having to go and actively seek out the information.  It keeps them informed of content they have an interest in by displaying any comments made on their blogs (or blogs they have subscribed to) as well as comments on articles, they have commented on and progress on any documents they have added to their 'favourites'. 

5. Blogs

Intranet blogs are becoming more mainstream and popular amongst our customers.  Blogs are informal, direct and natural and reflect the personality and voice of the person who is blogging - these qualities make blogs a very popular feature.

We are finding that as well as senior executive blogs, where corporate vision can be reinforced and news communicated quickly, blogs also give the power of communication to individuals at much lower ranks within the organisation allowing companies to capitalise on the opportunity to encourage communication and knowledge flow upwards through the organisation.

In order for your intranet to be really user-centric and provide all the key tools that your staff need on a day to day basis, then you should make sure that you have these killer apps on your intranet - they will drive people to your intranet and keep them coming back.

Do you know which keywords / search phrases people are entering and how to choose the most appropriate ones for your intranet content?

Finding this information is easy with Interact’s Statistics & Search Analytics which will give you detailed reports including:

• Failure to find report:  Highlights content deficiencies prompting content managers to add the missing information and can identify differences in terminology used.

• Searches with zero results:  highlights content that is missing, helps in the development of effective navigation and suitable keywords or metadata.

• Documents without keywords:  a list of documents where no keywords have been applied.  Highlights which documents may not be included in search results but may be relevant.
Having this information to hand is one thing; converting it into action that will benefit your intranet search is another. 

Find information black holes on your intranet

I’d like to share with you a couple of ways in which our customers use this information to stress the importance of keywords to content authors and ensure that content is tagged with appropriate keywords.

Helen Haynes, Intranet Manager at The Nottingham Building Society finds Interact’s search reports extremely useful:

“With the stats provided I forward all the details collected to the publishers of those articles. They then see a long excel list of information in their areas which people find hard to find. This is giving people an idea of the words to use when adding articles in the future and also highlights the use of the search facility”

Nicky Robbins at Rooftop Housing Group looks at the ‘failure to find report’ for review at their regular Intranet User Group meetings content authors are then tasked with changing or adding keywords to their content, hence improving search.

How do you use search statistics to ensure that your intranet content is tagged with the right keywords?  Post a comment and let us know.

We got our office iPad yesterday and after everyone finished playing with it then I took a look at interact on it and it look fantastic.  Here is a short video of interact intranet software using the iPad Safari browser.

Interact is compatible with all major browsers including browsers on the iPhone and iPad