DorjeM

A couple of nights ago I was up at 2am to listen to Gerry McGovern (www.customercarewords.com) and Rolf Molich (www.dialogdesign.dk) talk about how they quantify task measurement. I've listened to a couple of Gerry's web casts in the past and I think this one really made a very good compromise between providing useful information, and promoting the products Gerry sells via Customer Care Words. The following is my take on what Gerry and Rolf were trying to get across. Two really useful little things to begin with - a user click takes 4 to 5 seconds and to gain executive traction show user experience before and after. Gerry spoke about failure of intranets based on tools and content. Circa 2000 IT managed an intranet full of tools and the post 2000 intranet stuffed full of content managed by the communications team "like giving a pub to an alcoholic" - Gerry McGovern Gerry sees intranets today being TASK focused - the task solving t...

This is a summary of information relating to the recent 8th Annual Intranet summit. Some feedback from delegates via the Kiwi Intranets group - http://onlinegroups.net/groups/kiwi_intranets/ Michael Sampson blogged most presenters at the summit - http://www.michaelsampson.net/2008/08/brightstar-8t-1.html Dave Lane's presentation on Open source Intranets - http://pres.egressive.com/intranet_summit_2008/ Mike Riversdale presented and provides his comments and talk here - http://www.miramarmike.co.nz/intranetconference Chandima Kulathilake spoke about SharePoint and corporate governance - http://www.chandima.net/Blog/archive/2008/07/25/speaking-at-the-annual-strategic-intranet-summit-in-wellington-new-zealand.aspx I've provided comment on some of my thoughts around the event - http://dorjem.blogspot.com/ Red Shoe Girl, who attended has some comments on her impressions of many of the speakers and what their talks meant for her - http://wordpress.com/tag/8th-an...

Aaron Resting in a recent post on A list apart http://www.alistapart.com/articles/mappingmemory gives a very thought provoking look at the framework we view what it is to be intranet professionals through, and what it could mean to change that framework. How do you see yourself ? architect or cartographer ? Or something in between perhaps ? Aaron's musings tie well with the last sentence of an article by Elizabeth Marsh (IBF) from July http://www.intranetlife.com/intranet_benchmarking_for/2008/07/employee-direct.html In it she muses, in the last sentence, on how formal the term intranet is, compared to the reality of what intranets as concepts / things actually achieve. The area of language and how our ability to document in words what it is we, intranet professionals, do is something that I feel has importance for us all. If we can get our heads around the words then we'll find it easier to articulate the value we deliver to those who control the organisation...

The recent intranet summit in Wellington New Zealand showcased some wonderful presentations, by some very smart folks. The event was blogged by Michael Sampson for those of you wanting more details Of the hundreds of slides shown three really stood out from the crowd. Invariably the context was very important. The first was the following [souce: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrfrosted/568102079/ ] The second was from Grant Margison of www.informationleadership.com who showed the following slide prior to discussing SharePoint and it's role in an organisation's information framework. [source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/k-ron75/243290502/ ] The third was an image created by Greg Comfort who had co-opted the Jan 1973 cover of National Lampoon to illustrate how very important it is to not rely on a big stick. Giving staff compelling reasons to visit the intranet is a much better idea. [image: Greg Comfort | idea: google images ] One thing I'm keen to provide in f...

I was just listening to Paul Reynolds (http://mcgovernonline.blogspot.com/ ) on National Radio ( http://www.radionz.co.nz/ New Zealand's PBS) talking about www.Kiva.org and www.peoplesnetworknz.org.nz the quote that spoke to me was                   "Building it is easy, the tools are way in front of our imagination"       CONFIDENTIALITY: This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential, proprietary and privileged information, and unauthorised disclosure or use is prohibited. If you received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email from your system.  

I'm keen on saving the world Here are a couple of things we as intranet managers can do Get your developers to use YSlow (add on for FireFox) to help them optimize your intranet.                 http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ The less CPU cycles you use, the less power and heat generated - which means a better world One way you can do that is by making your images smaller Take a look at the 'Image Optimization' power point available from the following blog post. http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/06/performance_geeks_velocity_conference_oreilly.html :-) CONFIDENTIALITY: This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential, proprietary and privileged information, and unauthorised disclosure or use is prohibited. If you received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email from your system.

I've often been frustrated in the past by not having enough skill with image editing programs to be able to create the cool loading graphics that I see on other sites, because the site I'm working on has a background that isn't white or black.   The solution is   http://www.ajaxload.info/   You tell the tool what you require in the way of spinner, there a quite a few options, tell it the background color and hey presto you get given - I say given - a loading animated gif which would normally take hours to create.   Nice   :-) CONFIDENTIALITY: This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential, proprietary and privileged information, and unauthorised disclosure or use is prohibited. If you received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email from your system.