Intranet Blog

Why name your intranet?

When implementing an intranet for the first time or re-launching an existing intranet, I’m often asked whether it’s a good idea to give the intranet a name. 

The answer is simple – yes it’s a fantastic idea!

The intranet is part of your business and the last thing you want is people saying “it’s on the intranet” because this sounds too staid, boring and impersonal and makes it much harder to engage employees.

By naming your intranet an identity with personality is born and you’d be amazed by how quickly your intranet will become a vital business tool as it makes it a lot more friendly and approachable to your employees.

How do you choose a name?

Employee engagement is critical when it comes to user adoption of the intranet.  If you can engage employees from their first visit to the intranet, you are well on your way to long-term intranet success.

From my experience, the most successful launches have involved running a competition to name the intranet as part of the launch strategy with the winner receiving a prize and a feature news item being run on the intranet homepage on the day of launch.


Northumbria Probation Trust named their Intranet Noris (Northumbria Information Systems).  Noris was promoted on mug coasters and internal newsletters prior to launch and is now seen changing his intranet image for special events and seasonal changes.

Although we strongly recommend naming your intranet, there are a couple of occasions when it’s not a good idea – only use a name when promoting a new or re-launched intranet.  It will need more than a new name to aid a flagging intranet.  If an existing intranet is already well used and trusted by employees, it will just confuse employees if you change the name and may do more harm than good.

Shout about the name!

Remember to use the intranet name throughout your launch campaign and once it’s gone live.  BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) were going through a “Transformation Programme” when they were implementing their Intranet.  During this time their branding changed from blue to green.  After running a competition their Intranet was named “The Green Room”.  This was reflected in all promotional literature and on the day of launch they handed out green cupcakes with a flag in it within the new URL of the Intranet on it.  They even ran a competition on the day of launch to win a green i-Pod to encourage employees to complete their Intranet profile.

Examples of names that our customers have used

A catchy name, consistent use and good marketing may be just the thing to give your new intranet a successful start.

Mike Hague, Head of Design, Interact Intranet Software

One of the most frustrating things about any intranet is being unable to find the content you want quickly and easily.  Over the last 10 years of development on Interact Intranet Software we have constantly strived to ensure that tools are in place to make it as easy as possible to add keywords to documents.  Tagging serves two main purposes in any intranet.

• It ensures that intranet users can quickly find any content
• It allow users to find content on a certain topic – such as a product or specific hot discussion that is relevant in an company currently

The intelligence store in Interact makes this process a lot easier.  Here are a few of the ways that Interact helps content authors to tag and add keywords to content.

Interactive content tagging – Interact’s unique keyword suggestion tool suggests keywords that are similar to the one that you are adding.  More importantly it also tells you how often those keywords have been searched for in the last month so you can see what users are looking for.

Built in Thesaurus - The tagging tool links to the built-in thesaurus, which is fully editable by intranet managers.  This allows the intranet to learn a company’s jargon, technical terms or acronyms and relate them to commonly used words.  

For example, if you were running a project on Climate Change, but felt that many people would search for “global warming”, the two phrases can be linked.   By doing this, two things happen:

• Authors tagging a document with one phrase are automatically suggested the other phrase
• Like Google, users searching for one phrase are asked “Did You Mean... ?” and given a link to quicksearch for the other phrase

It is also important that the onus doesn’t just lie with the content authors and as enterprise 2.0 technology is becoming more prevalent in organisations users are demanding a more interactive approach to content.  We therefore allow users to suggest new keywords to tag a document or item of content.

 Posted by Nick Lewis, Product Manager, Interact Intranet Software