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Showing posts from 2007

Make it useful and they'll love it

AwayToday - useful and well loved The AwayToday feature created for the intranet I work on has garnered some interest via email and the Kiwi Intranets online group because it won a Gold Award in the Intranet innovation awards 2007 . To answer these questions and help the intranet community in general this post will out line some of the processes and features that have made this a well used and now essential tool. The problem : Staff absence from the workplace due to sickness, off site business commitments or travel for work caused a communications breakdown. This had a negative impact on our business. The solution : "Share the love" - but seriously, sharing the information that was already available to some staff with everyone was our solution. Let everyone know where everyone else was, or at the very lease let them know if they were in the office or not. To this we added when they could be expected back in the office. Background : Now used by staff globally the de

Intranet eating out

- how your intranet can have a free lunch by c onsuming XML services from the internet Business Problem Staff need to know the time in other offices around the world. The intranet tool I'd built in house worked well but every time somewhere changed their daylight saving time one or more office time's got out of synch and ended up being wrong. The tool relied on staff picking up problems, reporting them and me reacting. My reaction involved referencing the information on http://www.timeanddate.com/ And updating my code with what I found. Being keen on meeting new folks I contacted Steffen Thorsen, who created and maintains timeanddate.com, to see if he had any suggestions about my problem. The Solution Steffen said he was in the process of creating XML services that he thought might fit our requirements. Once timeanddate.com had given me a profile for their XML service I started looking at how I could reproduce my intran
The following is a copy of the "Taking care of your intranet" article on the Technology and Innovation page of the NZ Herald's pull out magazine called 'The Business' 25 June 2007. This aricle was written by Adam Gifford It is not available on the NZ Herald website (otherwise I would link to it) hence I have reproduced it here. I reference this article in my 'into the paper' post --------------------------- Page : Technology and Innovation Headline : Taking care of your intranet There are a few simple measures you can take to stop your intranet from becoming a wasteland, writes Adam Gifford. When was the last time you used your intranet, if your organisation has such a thing? Yesterday? Last week? Last month? The day it launched? Some organisations have put a lot of time and money into developing information-rich internal websites for use by staff or partners, only to see them becoming digital compost heaps, filled with information of red

And into the paper

Yes papers are still published and journalists still ring up folks for their opinion. A few weeks ago Adam Gifford rang me asking for help with an intranet article he was writing. Not knowing Adam from Adam I spoke to Dan Randow who had gave Adam my details, everything seemed on the up and up so I called Adam back, and now I'm in the paper. As the person who setup the 'Kiwi Intranets' group. Well that may be overstating things a little - My name is mentioned in NZ Herald's pull out magazine called 'The Business' 25 June 2007. You won't find me in their online archives so I'll post the text of the article here . Why bother blowing my own trumpet about this - well the great thing from my perspective was that, though not mentioned in the same sentence the other person asked for comment was Paul Reynolds. Paul is one of my heroes. A big thinker, someone with a global outlook, and a wonderful way with words. I saw Paul speak at the Bright Star in
To setup rails on IIS and enable it for multiple Applications. START Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 IIS 6 RUBY Install ruby 185_22_rc2.exe You don't have to put it in c:\ruby I created the following folder c:\webdata\ruby, then ran the install. Run install into c:\webdata and say "YES" to deleting the existing ruby directory. During the install I ticked SciTE and Enable RubyGems Took 10mins 1000s of files Ruby GEMS Install Ruby Gems 0.9.1 (don't change it from the defaults) Extract zip file to temp directory, then double click setup.rb, does the default install (about 5mins) Then run at the command line gem pristine --all c:\> gem pristine --all I tried to install Ruby Gems in a particular directory, but couldn't get it working because if you use the command line SET command to put a value into GEM_HOME when the ruby gems installer setup.rb reads the registry it doesn't account for the fact that values in the registry contain double b

Introduction

Hi there My name is Dorje and I run an intranet for a large corporate. I also facilitate an online forum for people who have an interest in intranets within New Zealand. Which is, as I'm sure you've guessed, where I live. I've working in the IT industry for about 8 years now, though I've been using computers since the Apple IIe came out. Thanks to Dad for that one. My goal with this Blog is to make use of it to provide useful information relating to my professional life. I'm sure personal bits and pieces will fall into this framework as well, but such is life. DM