Best Practices for Intranet Sites

See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html for the "10 Best Intranets of 2009". Its this year's results of a 9 year annual intranet design competition. Some tidbits I gleaned.

1. One of the strongest trends over the years is that intranet teams have been getting bigger. IMO Intranet teams are becoming the central administration and corporate communications departments for companies.

2. We're seeing a steady increase in user-centered design. Simple customization can often generate sizeable productivity wins. IMHO building web parts and user controls rather than just application pages is integral to this goal. Anything built for SharePoint ought to be plug-n-playable within user-customized pages that they'll be building for themselves.

3. To assess the ROI of intranet redesigns, teams primarily relied on usage metrics in terms of users, visits, or page views.

4. Collaboration features such as social networking, employee directories, CEO blogs and interactive forums are becoming vital. IMO the CEO doesn't write the blog. Its done by an Intranet team staff member who exchanges about 10 emails a day with the CEO's secretary who knows how to make emergency blog changes.

5. Many of the top intranets are built on a single intranet platform that integrates most of the supporting features they need.

6. Fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years. This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn't use earlier versions of SharePoint at all. This may help explain why I get hundreds of emails from recruiters every week.