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Make the Space Livable
Some of us have a nice rec room in the basement, but most basements exist to hold mechanicals, such as the furnace and hot-water heater, and to provide solid support for the floors above. The upper floors are where we live. The applications we implement on our intranets are where our users live. As long as everything is working OK in the basement, the folks living upstairs won't give the mechanicals a second thought.
During the past year, we've covered many of the furnishings that make up the intranet living space: real-time and asynchronous collaboration, document management, knowledge management, messaging systems, and portals. At the risk of sounding like pushy parents who insist they have a better idea about what you need, we will say you need to look at portal software early on.
A portal is a jumping-off point to content and applications, and is designed as an intuitive, personalized access point to the information your users need. Think of the portal as the decorating scheme that pulls everything else together. You've undoubtedly inherited some old stuff, such as legacy applications that were built before the browser was the ultimate front end. Building an intranet is a big enough challenge without needing to figure out ways to replace your legacy applications. Use a portal to integrate the old stuff and to give it a fresh new look by putting it on the Web.
When you're looking at a portal vendor, pay close attention to its list of partners. Partnerships are the name of the game, and a partnership between your portal vendor and one of your other intranet application vendors can mean the difference between integrating that application into the portal in a few minutes and working for hours and days and not really getting the results you wanted in the first place.
For example, Plumtree Software has three gadgets designed to integrate eRoom Technology Digital Workplace into your portal. Why? Because eRoom and Plumtree are partners. Also, be aware that everybody and his brother is now a portal vendor, so expect this market to experience a shakeout in the future. Look for vendors with a strong commitment to the portal market and a full-featured offering with positive reviews from a number of different publications. Hint: We looked at portal software in July 2001, and we think that Plumtree's portal software is a good place to start looking.
The big picture? Your users will be more productive when they can access the information they need to do their jobs from an integrated, personalized, Web-based front end. Many portal products include a form of single sign-on. Doing so helps address the problem of multiple points of authentication; protecting a single point of access from outside attack is also more manageable than attempting to address multiple entry points.
Since messaging products are widely implemented and every portal vendor worth considering integrates major players, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and other standards-based messaging products, we won't spend much time on this topic. We'll just say some of your users will appreciate an interface that integrates their inbox into the rest of the content they need daily. For example, the asynchronous collaboration products we review do this quite effectively. Mail sent to a project group also can be sent to a collaboration workspace, so all the information relating to the project can be accessed, indexed and searched at the same time.
Whether a workgroup's members are separated by drywall or by highways, all can benefit from the collaboration tools we looked at. Along with e-mail, these are the tools your users will need every day to work together and to keep information about their projects organized and accessible.
We recommend a mixture of real-time tools, such as instant messaging, whiteboarding, application sharing and voice-conferencing software as well as asynchronous tools, like document sharing and collaboration, shared task-lists and calendars, threaded discussions, and electronic polling. You can choose a product that mixes real-time and asynchronous features (such as eRoom Digital Workplace 5.4, which shares the Editor's Choice with Intraspect Software Intraspect 5 Applications -- Product Collaboration in our review), or you can implement best-of-breed software from each category. One trend we've seen is for employees to see a need and pull a solution together ad hoc if the IT department isn't ahead of the curve. Corporate implementation of AOL's Instant Messenger is a prime example. If you don't mind corporate information traveling around on the Internet unencrypted, don't worry. But if you're like us, you'll want to get ahead of the curve.
The big picture? You can't expect a carpenter to produce quality work without a hammer. The right tools equip your employees and co-workers to do their jobs, enhance your customer's experience and your company's reputation, and ultimately make a positive contribution to your bottom line.
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