On his blog SharingThePoint.com Daniel Lewis posts besides a lot of useful information, also some funny cartoons. Just click on SharePoint Comics in his Categories list. But the best I have seen so far was not from Daniel but from Lee Reed. Just judge for your self. At least I was laughing my ass of.
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Jakob Nielsen, the acclaimed usability guru, announces since 2001 every year the 10 best corporate intranets. The findings of him and his team are all collected in a report that you can download from here. The reports costs $224, so you might think twice about buying it as a private person, although I personally think it is a good investment. When you are part of a team that is responsible for your companies intranet it is a must-buy for you and the company.
The report reviews the designs and usability of the ten intranets that were chosen from a much larger number of nominated designs. The report is richly illustrated with 241 full-color screenshots, giving readers the unique opportunity to see good intranet designs that are usually hidden behind a firewall.
The 10 winning intranets are:
These intranets represent big companies with large amounts of documents and mission-critical applications such as sales force support. But most of the lessons from these winning designs apply to smaller companies as well.
The bulk of the report consists of detailed case studies of each of the ten winning intranet designs, including discussions of the main problems they faced, how these problems were overcome in the redesign process, and how the new design compared with the previous design.
For a very good and detailed summary you can read the article Nielsen announces the 10 Best Intranets of 2009 at http://www.internalcommshub.com/.
So how does this all relate to SharePoint?
Well, half of this years winners used SharePoint as a platform to create their intranet. The 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. But 50% of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform.
Microsoft SharePoint has seen substantially increased use among well-designed intranets in recent years. In 2007, Microsoft's own intranet was a winner, and they obviously used their own software, so the 2007 dot should be one lower if you consider only third-party projects.Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint – Jakob Nielsen
This year’s winners offer some interesting observations. The biggest, by far, and a trend that Watson Wyatt experienced hands-on in 2008 – is that Microsoft SharePoint is becoming the intranet platform of choice. - Michael Rudnick from Watson Wyatt
In terms of SharePoint, the report highlights a number of key points:
Despite the big growth in SharePoint use among the best intranets, the contest is far from over for intranet software platforms. Many other good enterprise software vendors offer widely used solutions.
SharePoint Collaboration Features
From a personal point of view I am excited about that this year's winners showed a substantial increase in both collaboration support and social networking features. Because that is exactly the area I am working in. But not everybody is convinced that SharePoint is actually a platform that can deliver this functionality.
Read for an interesting discussion on the readiness of SharePoint as an Enterprise 2.0 platform the following two articles. SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools and Response to "SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools". I am working on a detailed analysis of this discussion myself, so stay tuned.
When you are tasked with branding SharePoint you have a whole lot of options. Changing the look and feel of SharePoint is not very hard to do, but you have to know where to change what. And that is not always easy to find.
Recently I did a branding project myself. This was the first time for me to do something like that, and I discovered some great resources to help me finish the project successfully. I compiled my list here for you. When you have additional resources please add them in the comments.
After reading the post at the ShiSh List about Social Computing Scenarios I felt like sharing my experience last week with Social Media and Employee Training. I had a three day training that was structured as following:
Each day we had to look at a series of podcasts and work our way through some training material that was accessible on our SharePoint portal. In the afternoon we then joined a virtual meeting and collaboration environment where we got live presentations, team assignments and quizzes. For me these three days were a great experience regarding the Social Media aspect. Let me explain why.
First of all it was great to work a few days from home. With help from a VPN Client I have direct access to my company network. I could read the training material and look at my podcasts whenever it suited me best. For me that meant getting up early, go through the podcasts and training material and having time for a nice long run before lunch. Then after lunch (at least for me, or trainer was located in India), I joined the virtual meeting and collaboration environment. My fellow trainees were from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland. It is always interesting to work together with people from different nationalities, and this time was no exception.
In the virtual meeting we could talk to each other, draw together on a whiteboard, share materials and everything else what you expect from such an environment. During the presentations and breaks I was Instant Messaging with my fellow trainees. This way we actually got to know each other better, and had some really funny discussions. We also shared some pictures with help from Picassa.
While I was in the training sessions I switched the status of my office instant messaging client to “In a Training”, so all my colleagues knew I was in the middle of something, so I hardly got disturbed in between.
At the end of day one I connected to my fellow trainees through Social Networks like LinkedIn and Xing. And after the three day training I was able to do Content Rating for all the parts of the training (trainer, documents, presentations, podcasts). This means that my opinion counts, and my comments might improve the training.
I used Twitter to give some status updates in the breaks. And now I am actually blogging about my experience.
It were an interesting three days. Not only I learned a lot during the training, but I also learned first hand that Social Media and Employee Training is a Social Computing scenario that actually works!
But even with all that great technology out there, a training still needs three key elements to be successful:
One way to implement such functionality in SharePoint is with the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), a free, open source podcasting kit that offers organizations a centralized solution to create, manage and distribute podcasts. You can find the PKS on CodePlex. The PKS is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next generation knowledge management solution. Built on top of SharePoint Server 2007 and using Silverlight 2, the PKS delivers an integrated experience with a wide variety of devices including iPod, Zune, Windows Mobile phones, and other podcast capable devices. Information about how it is done, how it is supported and so on can be found in this post by Michael Gannotti.
SharePoint makes it easy to add and share content, and it is easy to locate specific content. The internal search engine being the most used method. Also on the web Microsoft Live, Google and Yahoo search results are returned to you using an automated ranking system that provides you with relevant and related pages.
But the ability to find relevant and related content does not necessarily mean, that you will find sound, reliable, or helpful content. At this stage of information technology it is still very hard for a computer to determine the value of content. People on the other hand are very capable of determining the value of content for them. A community of users that determine the value of content is a very powerful method to make great content retrievable within an enterprise.
One way to implement this is a content rating system. Content rating allows end users to rate and share their opinions on published content in a collaborative manner. I was looking for a way to implement such a system in SharePoint when I came across the SharePoint Document Rating System from Stephane Eyskens. He made this solution for everybody available on CodePlex.
The SharePoint Document Rating System uses a star-rating system throughout SharePoint, allowing users to rate documents, blog posts, forum discussions, photos and many other content on a scale of 1 through 5. Content with five stars has been deemed most valuable by the community members. 
The system is available for WSS as well as MOSS, with the latter having a few additional features.
SharePoint Document Rating for WSS
- Custom lists, document libraries, picture libraries, issue lists, calendars, links
- Discussion boards
- Pages
- Blog posts
- Moderator module
SharePoint Document Rating for MOSS
- Same features as WSS
- Search module : users can rate directly from the search results page
- A "Collect Rating" workflow : users can ask others to rate documents/items etc..via a workflow
- A specific page layout including a page rating control
- A rating policy allowing you to rate wiki pages, knowledge base etc...You can apply it on any page library.
Installing and configuring the system is very easy because Stephane wrote a great step-by-step manual that can be downloaded from CodePlex. I tested the rating system and I am really happy with the results. It really does what it promises, and looks pretty slick at the same time. And when you are not happy with certain aspects of the system, you can just download the code, and change it the way you want.
