wanhoff.com

Sometimes I am asked why a company with let’s say 40 employees needs an intranet. My answer is, because every company needs communication, documentation and knowledge management. And Intranets are just the best tools for it.

You can use it as a stand alone portal or integrate your CRM, your project management, whatever.

But: Before doing this, think first.

What you want to achieve with the intranet?
Who wants this?
What is the budget for time and money?

How important is Twitter? Quoting the website Social Media Statistics, “Hitwise says web visits have increased 8x in the last year, albeit from a minuscule base.
Compete shows about 900,000 U.S. monthly website visitors in 2008
Comscore puts the worldwide number at 1.3 million unique monthly visitors in March 2008 - None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients like Alert Thingy, MySocial24×7 and Twhirl. Many of Twitter’s most active users rarely visit the website.
March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day”

Some numbers about Facebook (same source):

* 8.4 million UK users of which…

o 3 million men
o 3.5 million women (the rest are unspecified)
o 1 million 13 - 18
o 3.8 million 18 – 24
o 2.8 million 24- 30
o 2.2 million 30 – 50
o 0.3 million 50 – 65

The age difference isn’t really a surprise.

The question always is, how to monetize these numbers. And that’s when the most social networks fail - at least until now.

The age of public collaboration over the Internet is still only in its infancy, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told AFP in an interview. ..Speaking on the sidelines of an awards ceremony in London, Wales said: “We’re really just at the beginning, still, of collaborative efforts.”

Jimmy Wales is right. Even if Wikipedia is a success, most people still uses email for collaboration instead of working together on one document. The reason: Microsoft Office is the software people are familiar with, and it works for most. So why change?

That’s actaully the challenge most consultants face: It’s not the technical part of implementing collaboration tools in a company, it’s more the change of culture when you introduce it.

Part of my work is collaborative work, and part of collaborative work are rules.

In a professional way, there are document creators and owners, who invite others to collaborate on a document. Changes are being seen in the revisions history. But the main part of collaboration is not that you can make changes but to talk about changes. That’s more a technical part.

Collaboration means informing people about changes and discuss it. That’s why I always suggest chat solutions combined with collaboration tools. and by the way, that’s the recipe of success for Wikipedia: The discussions are improving the quality.

So if you are thinking about collaborative tools, think about in total. Use the whole power of it. Because, if you start using this tools alone, then you will fail.

So just think about these steps:

Create a document

Start with some content

Write some comments on critical parts or where you think a discussion is useful

Invite others

Follow revisons

Work together on the document

Supervise it as you are the creator who needs at the end the best quality

Make decisions if needed

Note: Collaboration is a tool, not a philosophy. It should help working together and improving quality of work.

You may not know what Twitter is: It”s called a microblog. You can blog short messages up to 140 characters. People use it for status updates about what tehy are doing as well as as update on developing stories and events, like Steve Jobs Keynotes or the political situation in Thailand.
Twitter is a web-based tool, so there are security issues to use in in your protected company environment.

Jeremiah Owjang listed some tools in his blog they allow you to set up twitter like clients in your intranet.

How can you use it?
Think about news about the share value, or maintenance updates like a repair status of the broken coffee maker (sounds funny, but can be serious). Any kind of news can be provided, from the CEO’s schedule to crisis handling. Twittering is great when there is a situation what needs to provide information short and fast.

Of course you can also use it as a real status update like tfor projects.

Its up to you, how you use it. Maybe there is no use. But just think about it.

I am looking for a Vietnam based IT company with Drupal or other open source CMS experience for a intranet project.

A client (200 employees with several branches) needs a intranet solution, security is one issue, scalability another.

If you are interested please mail me at thomaswanhoff@me.com

Muhammad Siyab did a great post about why it is important to use the Google Search widget in your blog, additional to for example the wordpress search.

First of all, you’ll be hooking your blog with the most powerful search engine in the world, and use its sophisticated search algorithm, to power your blog’s search.

Second of all, there’s even an option to monetise your search pages, using Adsense, so you can earn money!

The money is the secondary benefit. The primary benefit is that you get to use Google’s power to make your blog better.

Read the whole story about Google Search in your blog

ZEN Habits worte an excellent article about how our work environment is rapidly changing. He noted 12 points or new rules of working:

Excerpts:

1. Online apps and the cloud beat the desktop and hard drive. While the majority of workers use desktop applications such as Microsoft Office, that’s rapidly changing. Today, people like me use apps that are almost all online, such as Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Gcal, WordPress, Twitter, Zoho Office, High Rise, Backpack and many others.

2. Collaborate on documents, don’t email them. I won’t name names, but recently I had to work with a group of people on a draft of a book. These people are intelligent people, but they are used to their old processes, and one of those is to use the Microsoft Word format for drafts, and to email revisions of the draft back and forth. In one case, they actually printed stuff out, marked up the printout, and FedExed it to me for further revisions

3. Collaboration is the new productivity. It used to be that we tried to work our butts off to produce, but mostly individually. Sure, there were meetings, and there were teams, but in the end we mostly did it individually. It’s still that way mostly.

Read the whole article

Sometimes I am asked why a company with lets say 40 employees needs an intranet. My answer is, because every company with more then 2 people staff needs it. Why?
Because of a possible lost of knowledge. Have you ever calculated how much it really costs to train a new employee? How much time he needs browsing through the thousands of emails of his ancestor?

Intranets are a perfect solution for knowledge management. Wether it’s a CMS, a Wiki or even a Sharepoint solution: The more data you save on a centralized server instead of PCs, the more this data is available to everyone who needs this information, the better the knowledge skills in your company are.

Intranets must not be expensive. Start something small with one of the fantasic open source solutions like Typo3, Drupal or Joomla. And then watch the organic grow.

Just want to point to this article about the question wether webdesign or SEO is more important. SEOBlogger says:

Thus, I believe that both SEO and Web design are extremely important to make a website successful. However, since I have to choose one, I will pick SEO. But I am not saying that you should only focus on SEO and ignore web design. Take your time to build the website carefully. Spend sufficient amount of time on both but spend a little more time on SEO. This way you will get traffic and still have a reasonably attractive website.

I totally agree. There is one exception: If you already catched your target group, have a close relationship with them and you provide visual information (like in an art gallery), you might be fine with a flashy animated website. But whenever you need traffic from Google, you need SEO for sure.