Article

By Cathy Dew

You want your Intranet to be valuable to your employees – you really do. You’ve probably made a significant investment in the technology. You’ve got management’s commitment and you have tons of content and features. You want an Intranet that speaks to employees, supports their workflow and delivers value. But how?

The biggest factor in pulling off this seemingly impossible task lies in personalizing the experience for your employees. Note the term personalize and not customize. Personalization happens automatically. Based on a few key user attributes, the system delivers the content that is specifically related to employee. Customization, in the other hand is up to the user. The system allows the employee to set colors, rearrange content on the screen or indicate interest in specific topics.  While most users don’t opt to customize, there can be an added sense of ownership and connection with the Intranet by enabling employees to also customize their experience.

Organizations are complicated. They can be highly structured in terms of departmental hierarchy, but often also have an organization of initiatives, people and products/services that cross departmental lines. The biggest complaint we hear is “I can’t find my stuff” and it’s easy to understand why. Couple that with the fact that employees don’t care about the same things that management does which often results in a feeling that the Intranet isn’t relevant to me. Email is still the go-to platform for many of the exchanges that happen on a local level.

SharePoint CMS can be used to develop and publish a broad spectrum of media across your organization.

In our next Plus16 webinar “Enterprise Intranet Best Practices: How to Deliver a Personalized Intranet Experience” we will delve into exactly this topic. We will share Best Practices, walk through some of the mechanics to make personalization work and show real-life examples of these principles in action. We will help you sort out what local versus global means in the content of delivering personalized content and features. Please join us for Enterprise Intranet Best Practices: How to Deliver a Personalized Intranet Experience.

Plus16 is a monthly webinar program connecting attendees with 2Plus2 developers, designers and implementers. From large scale intranets to multi-lingual marketing sites to targeted mobile implementations, 2Plus2 shares our knowledge of what it takes to make each project a success across design, technology and project management.