[DE] NNGroup: 7 von 10 Best Intranets of 2013 bauen auf SharePoint

//via Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

Die Nielsen Norman Group hat ihre alljährliche Top 10 Liste der besten Intranets veröffentlicht. Die Gewinner sind:

  • Acorda Therapeutics, Inc., USA
  • American International Group, Inc., USA
  • AT&T, USA
  • Hager Group, Deutschland
  • Luzerner Kantonalbank AG, Schweiz
  • ONO, Spanien
  • Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA), Saudi Arabien
  • Swiss Mobiliar Insurance & Pensions, Schweiz
  • WorkSafeBC, Kanada
  • XL Group plc, Irland

7 der 10 Gewinner nutzen SharePoint als Plattform für ihr Intranet, allerdings mit umfangreichen Anpassungen.

Aus der Studie ergeben sich ein paar weitere interessante Aspekte:

Es braucht Zeit, ein gutes Intranet aufzubauen

Creating a new intranet or intranet redesign has never been a small or quick endeavor. Since 2001, we’ve tracked the length of time it takes to create a great intranet from inception to launch. On average, the process lasts for 42 months—or about 3.5 years. This year, the average was 27 months, or about 2.3 years to create the winning designs.

Die Größe der betreuenden Intranet Teams wächst

Although organization size has been decreasing, the average intranet team size is increasing—this year to an impressive all-time Design Annual high of 27 people working on the intranet.

Mitarbeiter, die Inhalte bereitstellen, möglichst früh in den Intranet-Entwicklungsprozess mit einbinden 

The best intranet teams involve people from around the organization at the new intranet’s very inception, ensuring that employees from varied teams, offices, and cities describe their needs and way of working. One group that used to fall through the cracks was content writers, who were often brought in later in the design process. Winning teams this year met with content owners and writers very early on, so they could relentlessly cut unused content, edit older content, give feedback, and have adequate time to migrate, test, and optimize.

SharePoint als Intranet

Speziell zum Thema SharePoint werden in dem Report verschiedene Tipps aus der Praxis zusammengefasst:

  • Use SharePoint features to tackle usability challenges. Several vexing intranet usability issues can be solved using SharePoint features:
    • Improve search capabilities using embedded indexing of all content. SharePoint enables indexing not only by document or page titles, but also by all content on every page. Organizations such as Hager Group used this to greatly improve search capabilities. The taxonomy model facilitates efficient metadata or full text searches with refinement options.
    • Facilitate document creation and management through MS Office integration.
    • Restrict and hide features, such as editing controls, from users who don’t need them.
  • Plan for design customization and development to make SharePoint work well for your organization. It’s a misconception that any out-of-box product will be great for an organization; such products typically require considerable design and development work. Indeed, you might need to hire external resources to help with development. Five of the seven sites that use SharePoint hired external SharePoint consultants to make the most of the system.
  • Educate employees about team (collaboration) spaces, and develop rules about when to create new spaces. SharePoint makes it easy to create team spaces that let non-developers set up and maintain areas for people to communicate. These areas can become thriving, breathing ecosystems that aid teams—or dark silos where information is old, duplicated, buried, and difficult to find, especially for people unfamiliar with the space. If organizations aren’t careful, an old intranet problem—having content hidden among many different intranet sites—could easily rear its ugly head in a slightly altered form today. [..] Team spaces let people share all kinds of content, which is a very powerful model within organizations. However, with this model, general corporate content can fall through the cracks. To avoid this, establishing a communications team for the organization can be helpful.
  • Understand that implementing your own branding can take time. Designers agree that using the organization’s branding is a SharePoint specialist’s job, as is customizing the default SharePoint UI to draw attention to particular areas.
  • Keep permissions simple. Designers tend to make personalization very helpful for users, but complex on the backend due to very specific roles. In all systems, this can be a quagmire to plan and maintain, and SharePoint is no different. To avoid this, winners this year recommend that you protect confidential documents, but don’t put too much granularity in the permissions.
  • Accompany Enterprise 2.0 features with good planning and employee communication. SharePoint makes it easy to switch on powerful features such as commenting and rating, but employees need guidance on how to use these features on intranets. For example, management should formally sanction and use social features, and a document should live on the intranet describing expectations and rules surrounding their use. To assist content writers in encouraging reader responses, have them add a question or a call to action at the end of all articles to get readers thinking about the topic. Finally, persuade champions to start the conversations; many people are interested in commenting, but don’t want to be the first to do so.

Eine ausführliche Zusammenfassung des Reports gibt es kostenlos auf den Seiten der NNGroup, der vollständige Report (373 Seiten) kostet US$ 248,- und kann von der NNGroup heruntergeladen werden.