Selecting the right content management system remains a tricky task in an overcrowded marketplace. Unfortunately most industry analysts tend to cover too many vendors, while leaving out important national vendors.

Based on input from our members as well as our extensive experience with CMS selection, this shortlist is intended to help you navigate the UK marketplace. The list is geared towards buyers from large and complex organisations with significant web demands.

The CMS marketplace remains fragmented and unconsolidated. Many buyers are stuck with outdated systems that are holding them back from fully executing their digital plans. With digital first being the prevailing agenda in many organisations and with with increased expectations from website visitors, the importance of selecting the right CMS is obvious.

Top 10 CMS vendors in UK in 2013

• Adobe
• Contensis
• Drupal
• EPiServer
• GOSS
• Oracle
• Plone
• Sitecore
• Squiz
• Terminalfour

Who's missing? Honourable mentions and high fives

• Microsoft SharePoint is widely adopted, but often for the wrong reasons. Unlike any other product in the marketplace, SharePoint is rarely selected for its strengths such as suitability for intranets and collaboration purposes; rather it is selected as part of a broader IT strategy or simply because it is already in use in the organisation. External websites is still a weakness for the product, also in the recently released 2013 edition. Finally, Microsoft still remains uninterested in CMS.
• WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and "still not good enough". It looks like this is changing, in particular in the UK marketplace, and WordPress might be found on future Top 10 lists.
• Jadu is a UK-based CMS vendors that deserves a high-five. They've been around for a while, have many UK references, appear on shortlists every so often. Yet they seem to increasingly be feeling the competitive pressure.
• Kentico is clearly up and coming with an expanding and experienced UK team of CMS industry experts.
• Magnolia still appears like the only CMS vendor that have really done something when it comes to rethinking CMS in a mobile-first world. Besides their focus on mobile, their community is slowly, but truly growing.

The slides with the UK CMS shortlist

Our methodology

Our list is mostly based on:

• J. Boye Groups; with over 500 members from around the world, including several UK-only groups and groups with UK multinationals, we get to look behind the scenes and hear what happens after the sales presentations.
• Consulting on CMS selection; we've seen how a CMS procurement can go wrong - even when the project is started with the best intentions on all sides. We know what it takes internally, how vendors read the invitations to tender and how they might respond.
• Experts views from the wider community. This list has been based on user input and conversations with agencies, analysts, customers and vendors. In particular intangibles such as community, partner network and roadmap has played a key role.

Putting together a shortlist is a challenging part of any CMS selection, especially if you don't use external expertise. Therefore, the main intention was to help you -- the buyers -- by sharing the list of frequently appearing vendors.

J. Boye is not saying that the 10 vendors are safe choices for everybody and certainly not saying that the list represents the best choices for every imaginable scenario. We are simply recommending that large and complex organisations with significant web demands ought to consider those vendors in the current marketplace.

Feel free to share your comments below.

Learn more about the CMS marketplace

Read our Top 10 CMS vendor list for Germany, Austria and Switzerland and our 2009 global CMS shortlist

You can also consider attending our CMS Expert Groups, where CMS analysts, thinkers, practitioners, experts and vendors meet, set the agenda for future industry developments, provide feedback and share thoughts and ideas in an inspiring setting.

Is your organisation ready for a social intranet? Studies show that social often fails: A recent report from Gartner found that 80% of all social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits. How to make sure that you are part of the 20% ?

I recently spoke with Marc Jadoul, Marketing Director at Alcatel-Lucent and advocate for the company’s social intranet called ‘Engage’, about the benefits of a social platform – and how to reap them.

Knowledge workers in a high-tech company

Social intranets are especially relevant for organisations that rely heavily on knowledge workers, such as consulting firms and high-tech companies. In a previous blog post, I wrote about how a social intranet can unlock the tacit knowledge that sits in the brains of the employees. Alcatel-Lucent is a typical example of an organisation that is experiencing the benefits from going social:

• A workforce consisting mainly of highly skilled engineers and technical sales people
• A complex, multi-national organisation
• Active in a highly competitive market where innovation and speed of execution are key

According to Laurie Buczek of Intel, knowledge workers spend up to 30% of their working day looking for people and information. A waste of precious time and human resources that may be dramatically reduced by providing employees with appropriate communication tools, putting collaboration and knowledge sharing on the foreplan. This is exactly what Engage aims to do.

Knowledge is power, but community is strength

Alcatel-Lucent’s Jive-based platform is providing a user-friendly environment that empowers over 70,000 employees worldwide to connect and collaborate with each other, and to contribute to over 4,000 work and non-work related communities.

The screenshot below shows the home page of Engage (that can be further customised and personalised by each individual user). It illustrates the approach taken: a rich combination of various types of content, ranging from traditional news stories to blogs, group discussions, unanswered questions and tag clouds to help users find topics and communities of interest to them.

Alcatel-Lucent’s implementation focuses strongly on internal communities and the value that they bring. “It’s all about growing cross-organisational knowledge that we can apply in our day-to-day business” says Marc. “Communities will help to break down organisational silos, put people in touch with like-minded colleagues and provide the opportunity to learn and innovate.”

A light governance model, based on a code of conduct and the principle of self-regulation, has proven its value – only on very rare occasions does the community manager need to step in. It must be noted however that – although a light governance has proven to be the right path towards rapid and smooth adoption – a new collaboration model like the one empowered by Engage can only succeed in an open-minded organisation, in which people, teams and leadership are willing and motivated to transform.

Measuring real value

The hardest part of any social intranet project is to demonstrate the ROI. Earlier this year I wrote about the case of Omron and how their intranet delivers value to the business.

To understand the ROI of platforms such as Engage, it's important to understand the costs of conducting business without these tools, including the missed opportunities of not using them. At Alcatel-Lucent the approach has been to demonstrate success by collecting both quantitative and qualitative feedback from employees and business stakeholders. Some examples:

• “We saved 450 minutes/week in project status conference calls”
• “We got better answers to questions in 30 minutes instead of hours”
• “I have been working 11 years with this company now and because of Engage, I feel more connected with my colleagues now”

Sometimes even non-business related communities on Engage led to unexpected cost-savings. As an example, pictures taken by employees and shared in the community of interest on photography were reused in marketing materials, instead of paying for professional stock photos.

“Another KPI to take into account is the positive effect on company culture, corporate image and employee retention,” says Marc Jadoul. “Recent research by Alcatel-Lucent has shown that in highly successful companies management, IT and HR work together to equip workers with productivity tools that enable a ‘New Way of Working.’”

Intranet is a journey, not a destination

What’s the next challenge for the intranet of Alcatel-Lucent? More integration comes to mind: currently Engage co-exists with a traditional, managed intranet for official communication and with a SharePoint platform for team collaboration. This is a typical phase in the evolution of many organisations’ intranets and matches with Jane McConnell’s model for intranet maturity.

“Today there is only basic cross-linking between the 3 environments,” says Marc. “The next step on our journey is to create a more integrated digital workplace, where employees are presented with a single user experience.”

Want to learn more?

Would you like to see more examples of social intranets and hear the stories behind them – including often some tough ‘lessons learned’? Check out these opportunities:

• Learn from the best: Our next international conference for web and intranet professionals takes place in Philadelphia from 7 to 9 May 2013. Secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We'll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

Concerned about your career as an intranet manager? Overwhelmed by the latest in social, collaboration and mobile software? Unsure how the 'digital workplace' will affect your job? One thing is certain: you're not alone!

At J. Boye, we get our insights and inspiration mainly from talking to our 500+ customers in our many groups of web and intranet practitioners. I have recently spoken to several intranet managers from large and medium-sized organizations. Many of them share the same doubts, but are at the same time taking action and making investments to improve their existing intranets.

Let's have a closer look at two areas where most intranet investments are being made, and discuss how you as an intranet manager can stay on top of things.

1.  Supporting the ‘New World of Work’

A lot has been said and written about the merits of the ‘New World of Work’ or 'NWOW' as Microsoft and others have called it. And while the final verdict may still be out on how much flexibility people and organizations can absorb (check the recent story of how Yahoo is cutting back on working from home), it’s clear that there is no turning back to the old days.

Intranets are growing and maturing in order to support this New World of Work. Yes, the traditional intranet with its official content and corporate news stories will still have a place, but a much smaller one than before. Investments are made elsewhere: Social, collaboration and especially mobile capabilities will ensure that the employees of 2015 will work together efficiently anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Introducing NWOW is quickly becoming a priority in many organizations, and so will be the transformation of their intranet. In an earlier blog post, I talked about Omron as a great example of how a social intranet can support this transformation and deliver tangible business benefits. In the coming months we’ll be showcasing more examples from our customer base. Stay tuned!

2.  Unlocking tacit knowledge

Many organizations are introducing social features on their intranet or are implementing a brand-new social business platform. When looking beyond the hype, the main business driver is often about unlocking the tacit knowledge that sits in the brains of the employees.

The importance of tacit knowledge in a corporate environment has been studied and popularized by Ikujiro Nonaka in his Harvard Business Review article and book titled ‘The Knowledge-Creating Company’. Tacit knowledge, as opposed to explicit knowledge, is difficult to capture and document in any formal way. Traditional knowledge management systems are of no help. But social business software can be a part of the solution: at a minimum, it makes the organization’s experts reachable by others and encourages them to share their expertise in online communities and discussion forums. A great example of this is Engage, the social intranet of Alcatel-Lucent, where a combination of communities, wikis and blogs is helping to break down silos and encourage innovation.

Companies increasingly realize the importance of making expert knowledge accessible, across physical locations and departmental silos, in support of business objectives such as product innovation, faster time-to-market and better customer service. In Jane McConnell’s recent digital workplace survey, ‘organizational intelligence’ came out as the top strategic driver for investing in an improved intranet / digital workplace (‘efficiency and cost savings’ was a close second). Clearly, the old management adage ‘people are our most important asset’ – in the past often just lip service – is now becoming a reality.

Lead, follow or get out of the way: Threats and opportunities for tomorrow’s intranet manager

What is the impact of these trends on the career prospects of intranet managers? As is often the case, there are two sides to the coin:

Threats: The traditional intranet is certainly under threat, and so is its manager. Intranet managers who cling to their familiar platform for top-down, controlled content are at risk of being marginalized. Some typical behaviors that I've seen and that are counterpoductive:

• Don't fight the well-meant initiatives of other departments. If IT has decided to launch a new SharePoint platform, or if the business units are experimenting with Yammer, then try to integrate these initiatives into your existing intranet plans. Embrace innovation, don't sulk.
• Don't try to control all content. Accept that user-generated content is good and that people in general will be sensible and respectful. Provide guidelines and be a facilitator, don't be the guardian of a dying breed of 'official' corporate-controlled intranets.

Opportunities: These clearly outweigh the threats. Intranet managers have a unique opportunity to show their vision, take the lead in the transformation process and build a new career for themselves. Some examples of how you can shine:

• Build a 3-year roadmap (no more, as things move extremely fast) for the evolution of the intranet: This is a great exercise for you as an intranet manager. It gives you a reason to go and talk to people across the organization, build credibility and show senior management that you're taking charge.
• Think multi-disciplinary: New World of Work initiatives typically involve people from departments as diverse as HR, IT and Facilities Management. As intranet manager you are ideally placed to bring these people together in a common project.
• 'Ask for forgiveness, not for permission': Leadership is about taking calculated risks and showing initiative, cutting through red tape when needed. Even if your official job description does not mention 'social' or 'collaboration', don't let this stop you to do the right thing.

Do you see the same or different trends in your organization? Are you grasping the opportunities? Let us know!

Want to learn more?

Would you like to meet other intranet managers face to face and discuss these issues with them? Check out these opportunities:

• Learn from the best: Our next international conference for web and intranet professionals takes place in Philadelphia from 7 to 9 May 2013. Secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We'll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

WordPress has a reference list which tops any of the other candidates when enterprises select new content management systems. It is used by BT (formerly British Telecom), CIO.gov, National Geographic and Nokia just to mention a few and has everything you need in terms of security and scalability. It now actually powers around  17% of all "top 1 million sites" according to Wikipedia. Finally, WordPress is open source and can be downloaded and used free of charge.

Despite all these apparent strengths, very few organisations consider WordPress as an option when they go through a CMS selection exercise. Large and complex organisations seem to mostly ignore it. Why is that?

WordPress is not considered a CMS

According to the J. Boye Group members, I've spoken to for this article, one frequent explanation why WordPress is ignored is that many don't even consider WordPress a CMS. Instead, it is considered and categorized as a popular blogging tool.

The few that do think of WordPress as a CMS consider it mostly suitable for smaller sites, including personal blogs. Those extremely rare digital managers, online communicators and others who have raised WordPress as an option internally, have often been shot down by IT departments who do not consider it suitable for anything business critical.

To be fair to customers, WordPress and the people behind it have gone to great lengths to avoid labelling WordPress a CMS. So far, the WordPress marketing has been as a "Blog Tool and Publishing Platform", while CMS was only recently added to the list.

5 good reasons you should consider WordPress

As mentioned, WordPress has many strengths.

Here are my 5 good reasons you should consider WordPress for your next CMS selection:

• It has a strong, global and vibrant community
• The user interface is comparatively easy to use and widely localized
• Despite the fact that it has so far flown below the radar, it already has references in all industries
• A wide-ranging list of modules, including for mobile, which is matched in numbers only by SharePoint
• Tend to be cheap to implement and host

WordPress is not perfect

While WordPress deserves a place on most CMS selection shortlists, it is far from perfect either.

Keeping up with the frequent upgrades and making sure plug-ins and customisations still work tends to be an underestimated task among WordPress customers. Extensibility may be the biggest strength, but to many enterprises it is also the biggest weakness as the inexperienced developer and webmaster can easily turn WordPress into an unmanageable black hole and leave you stuck on an old and potentially insecure version.

A few features where WordPress is not best-in-class include complex workflows, fine-grained permissioning and digital marketing requirements such as campaigns.

My advice to the CMS Experts among the readers and anyone else reading these lines would be to stop discussing whether WordPress qualifes to be considered a CMS and instead move on and consider WordPress where it makes sense.

At a time when enterprises are creating and retaining more information than ever before, the imperative for a managed search environment is more pressing than ever. Enterprise Search shares a clear vision of what organisations must do to enable effective access to this information, of critical importance to successful business decision-making.

The message at the heart of Martin White’s book titled Enterprise Search - Enhancing Business Performance is that the critical success factor for effective Enterprise Search is investment in people in the form of a “Search Support Team”. This team is the key to unlocking access to the enterprise’s information assets and delivering the sustained focus necessary to keep that capability relevant in the constantly evolving needs of the modern digital workplace.

Acknowledging from the outset how challenging it is to deliver effective enterprise search, Martin White presents all the essential elements for success with search in an accessible, practical and deliberately non technically-focussed way. If you are looking for a book with concise, practical information on how to either get more from your current search investment or to maximise the investment you are considering making, then this is the book for you!

Martin White has been using computer-based search applications since 1974 and in the consulting business since 1979. He founded Intranet Focus Ltd. in 1999 to provide clients with vendor-independent advice on intranet and information management strategy development and implementation and as such has a wealth of expert knowledge and experience to draw on in this his 7th book.

Available as both an e-book and in print format, I am confident that anyone passionate about improving the access to enterprise information assets, will find this book an invaluable and regularly referenced companion.

Learn more about enterprise search

You can meet Martin White in person at the J. Boye Search Day in London on February 13, J. Boye Search Day in Copenhagen on March 18 & J. Boye Search Day in Oslo on March 19.

When I speak to intranet managers about social intranets, the one question that they ask me most often is: ‘How do I justify the investment in a social intranet to senior management?’ Many organizations are struggling to find and to quantify the business value of implementing a social and collaborative intranet.

Omron Europe, a leader in industrial automation, did this exercise successfully and implemented Ozone, a state-of-the-art intranet with a strong focus on delivering tangible business value. Here is a behind-the-scenes look  at how they achieved this.

Where is the pain?

Before diving into technology selection and solution building, Omron took the time to investigate first. Using a Business Value Analysis methodology, the project team went around the organization looking for the needs and especially the pain points of employees. Three areas of pain emerged:

1. Finding information to do the job: ‘Sales is not aware of what is available and what we can offer’
2. Communicate, share and work together: ‘Who is our expert on solar technology in Germany?’
3. Better tools to make a specific task easier: ‘I won’t open all those databases and systems before every customer visit’

Based on this analysis, the priorities for the new intranet became clear. What was needed was an easy-to-use, integrated solution that offers a combination of traditional content (finding information) and social features (communicate, share and work together).

Integration at the glass

The screenshot below shows the personalized homepage of Ozone. Underpinning the dashboard-style design is a concept, which Omron calls ‘Integration at the glass’: Various back-office IT systems are integrated at the level of the user interface (the ‘glass’). The end user sees a unified dashboard with a consistent look and feel, not a multitude of databases and legacy systems.

Examples of business functionality

The strength of Omron's intranet lies in the business value it delivers. Much of this comes through a variety of dashboards that allow the employees to steer themselves towards their objectives. These are a reflection of the strongly held belief that 'if you give employees a clear objective and a good dashboard, they will drive themselves'. Some examples of the dashboards:

• All social features of Ozone are accessible from a single page. Employee profile, communities, shared documents, latest blogs and wikis are all just one click away from the home page.
• Customer dashboards, grouping all relevant information related to a specific account.
• Sales and business dashboards with data about performance of the various country organizations.

The most popular applications are those that are solving a real business problem for a specific group of people. For the sales force of Omron, the killer app is a ‘prospect navigator’ application using Google Maps to show sales people on the road the route to a nearby prospective customer. This allows the salesperson to combine more customer visits on a single trip, thereby dramatically increasing efficiency and customer-facing time.

Towards the digital workplace

I recently saw a live demo of Ozone when Michel Min, Head of Strategic Communication and e-Marketing, participated in a J. Boye intranet group meeting in Brussels. It was great to see a successful example of an intranet that has moved beyond the traditional format and is approaching the ‘digital workplace’ that many industry thought leaders talk about so much these days. The strong focus on delivering business functionality has lifted the intranet to become a business-critical tool for everyone to do their daily jobs.

Or, as one group member put it: ‘Until today I was skeptical about the value that a social intranet brings, but now I am convinced that it can be done!’

Next steps

No intranet is ever perfect or finished. While Ozone has been rolled out successfully in Europe, other parts of the world are not yet covered, including the headquarters in Japan. Other improvements on Michel Min’s to-do list: adding external social media sources (for instance about competitors) and give access to partner companies.

Want to learn more?

Would you like to see more examples of social intranets and hear the stories behind them – including often some tough ‘lessons learned’? Check out these opportunities:

• Learn from the best: Our next international conference for web and intranet professionals takes place in Philadelphia from 7 to 9 May 2013. Secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We'll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

About 15 years ago, I had the great fortune to work for an American Internet software company in Germany. An exciting time. My direct superior was a highly successful German sales executive, whose unique personal style – spiced with hard work, politically incorrect humour and too many cigarettes – taught me an awful lot. Including these 2 key mantras:

“Your experience and your network are all that matters. Everything else you can learn”
“Our real product is not the software, not the features, not the project – but trust”

Having seen way too many misguided digital strategies and failed web/intranet projects in the 5 years before, I started my own business. I felt that there had to be a better way. Not better software, not yet another agency, but a radically different way to increase the sum total of knowledge – and the benefits of such know-how – for customers and vendors alike.

When I launched J. Boye almost 10 years ago, we built the business on trying to leverage experience and networking in such a way that customers felt they were in safe hands – that they could trust us. With their commercial secrets, their personal careers and even their innermost doubts.

At the beginning of 2013 we’ve reached 500+ members in the J. Boye Groups, more than 2,000+ participants at the J. Boye Conferences held in Europe and America, we've carried out high-level consultancy work for large, complex global organisations, and – last but not least – somehow managed to build a talented team of people who are both inspiring and fun to work with.

The J. Boye focus remains digital. However, while being experts in the field of Content Management Systems (and other digital tools-for-the-job) remains the core focus for the J. Boye organisation as a whole, experience has taught me that finding broader-perspective ways to help our customers turn practical, technical experience into concrete commercial advantage is increasingly becoming the real agenda. Knowledge only has value when it is actually applied.

Getting experienced help to write the book

I’ve had the honour and privilege of working with many smart external business partners who have advised me over the past decade.

Among them is David Lalley, who has been working mostly behind the scenes so far, but has been instrumental in getting me to a clearer understanding of what makes the J. Boye approach unique, and trying to help us all understand the true customer benefits and commercial value of the sometimes disconcertingly intangible services we provide. And why all this is so important.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve decided to write a book with David Lalley on this exact topic: turning experience into advantage.

And to make sure we practice what we preach, a lot of the writing process will be out in the open. We plan to share our thinking along the way, with regular blog postings, discussions and many open questions. To get started, we’ve set up a Facebook page called Experiology Inc. and launched experiolo.gy. This blog will now revert to its normal topics.

I hope you find this process as exciting as I do, and will monitor and comment on what we’re doing along the way.

Stay tuned and wish us luck!

PS: The book will be out by July 2013 (we reckon!).

It happens – more frequently than it should – that you meet an intranet manager with a somewhat disgruntled look on her face when you start talking about how their intranet is doing. More often than not this is because they are in the middle of a big redesign or a big upgrade to the next version of the intranet platform which ought to be good news. But often it is just one more in a long line of intranet projects which historically have been testing the patience of the intranet team – not to mention the colleagues.

The big problem is that the intranet is too often seen as a project. You may have a nice intranet vision that talks about how your intranet will be the one place above all and must support the business goals and strategies. So, I ask: Since when did it become a business goal to always use the latest version of SharePoint?

Sustained intranet development needed

Some intranet managers argue that you need a more sustainable development model where changes happen incrementally. You need to match what the employees expect from a digital solution that supports their daily work. This is a product of what they need on a daily basis to do their job, but increasingly also what they see and experience on consumer websites. This means that the expectations will grow gradually, which fits nicely with the incremental model. However, from time to time you will see a major shift in the consumer web (eg. Google, Social networking, Mobile) and the user’s expectation shifts with it.

If your development model is based on small, incremental changes it will be hard to catch up with these big changes and you will, over time, see a widening gap between the expectations from the users and the actual offering on your intranet as illustrated in the figure below.

The accelerated development in expectations and the widening gap will result in people moving away from using the intranet or even worse, you will experience mutiny where the users take charge and move elsewhere.

The recurring intranet project

A natural approach to dealing with the shifts will be to rely on the platform vendors to fix this. They have the development capability to make this happen, but the big problem is that all of this development tends to happen retrospectively. The result is that you will have solutions that – at best – gets you up to par. Rarely does it put you ahead of the curve.

Internally in the organization the result is a situation where you do meet the expectations of the employees but you are left with a continuous change management task that you need to attend to while doing the next project. Every major change increases the organizational uncertainty and decreases the trust in your intranet. Combined with the fact that most organizations are not equipped to handle that level of change in an efficient way, you are likely to end up in what can be described as a “perpetual beta situation” where the end users never feel comfortable using the intranet.

The risk of mutiny as described earlier is minimal as the platform meets all requirements for those who would leave, but for the majority of users the level of uncertainty will make them defect i.e. give up on the intranet altogether. Proper change management can prevent this, but in a scenario where change becomes a constant, even your change agents will struggle with keeping up and in the end you will see the perception and satisfaction with your intranet decline.

The balanced intranet development approach

The incremental model comes up short and the project based is too risky – then what?

The key to the answer is to be very aware of the gap between expectations and what you offer. You need to incrementally develop your intranet but do not try to keep up with all the latest trends and infatuations.

Monitor the developments internally and listen to what the users say they need. Two people who think that a social network is a great idea is not enough to warrant as much as one minute spent on clarification but if you see 1000 people using 4 competing solutions then you have discovered a potential need and this is when you need to intervene.

One of my favorite quotes is from American philosopher Henry David Thoreau:

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success

This describes the above model quite nicely. Any big leap like this will to a certain extent be into the dark and there is an enormous change management task ahead. The good thing, however, is that you will be able to plan ahead and knowing that you will go back to the trusted incremental development, you will have every chance to succeed using frameworks like Kurt Lewin’s model for change management.

The biggest risk in this scenario occurs if you cheap out on the change management part - do this wrong or with too little impact and you will have alienated all users because of the huge change and your intranet is doomed. It’s simply not enough to post a story on the intranet and run 4 webinars for the employees.

Minding the gap - also on your intranet

How to assess the gap between your current intranet and the employee’s expectations is not an exact science and there are many factors playing a role on this. It will be a complex mix of internal factors like company culture and technical proficiency among staff but also factors like company growth strategies (acquisitions require more flexibility than organic growth), management turnover rate (new people bring other expectations), and change frequency in core business processes (little or no change in the processes = few changes in tasks = slow intranet development) contribute to the size and growth of this gap.

In the end it all boils down to finding the right balance. Many of you are probably thinking that this is all about governance so why this talk about development models? I don’t disagree – governance is hugely important here to ensure that you have all the resources you need both people-wise and financially. But even the most well governed intranet may fall into one of these traps.

Incremental, Project based or Sustainable – all three models can work but only as long as you watch out carefully and mind the gap distance between the train and the platform.

Learn more and continue the intranet conversation

If you found this useful and have any comments, please feel free to share them below.

I'm speaking on this exact topic on the intranet conference track at J. Boye Aarhus 12 in November and hope to see you there!

In recent years, the Dutch government has made some bold choices to open up its online information in many different ways. This resulted amongst others in 2010 in a brand-new website rijksoverheid.nl, the main site for communication between the Dutch central government and its citizens. This site is based on open-source CMS technology from Dutch CMS specialist Hippo. In 2011 a unified intranet for all government ministries followed.

Since its launch in 2010 the website rijksoverheid.nl applies the Creative Commons zero declaration (CC0) to the content of the website, unless stated otherwise. This means that all content available on the site is in the public domain and is free from copyright or other usage restrictions. This is important in order to facilitate the re-use of the data/content. Other government websites have taken the same approach, for instance www.government.nl and www.answersforbusiness.nl

More recently, the focus has shifted to what comes after openness: the sharing – in electronic, computer-readable formats – of various types of open data produced by government agencies and public institutions.

So what exactly is meant with ‘open data’? What type of information is made available, and how is this being re-used in commercial websites and mobile apps? Read on to find out the answers and get inspired to apply ‘open data’ in your own context.

What is ‘Open Data’?

Open data is information that can be used and spread freely by everyone, without restrictions from copyrights, patents or other controls. The basic philosophy behind open data is not new, but the term has been popularized recently thanks to some major open data initiatives in the worlds of science and government.

The basic idea is simple: When information is freely shared, it will stimulate individuals and organizations to re-use, combine and build on the available data. Typical examples include commercial use in new online applications, or use for scientific research.

In the past, the problem with this type of information was that it was often difficult to find or not available in any standardized, machine-readable format. This is now changing in the Netherlands: An increasing number of datasets are becoming available on the dedicated portal site data.overheid.nl. To access the data from within other applications, open standards are supported, allowing the developers to focus on creating added value with the data, rather than on low-level data manipulation and communication.

Some examples of data sets that are being shared:

• Education data: For instance, the number of students in the various types of primary and secondary schools across the country
• Weather data: evolution of showers from satellite data, information from local observation posts, water levels in rivers and canals, …
• Maps: from historical maps and drawings to recent geographical data

How re-use of open data stimulates innovation

The main objective of the Dutch government is to stimulate the development of new innovative applications. A first example – see screenshot below – is the site weetmeer.nl (‘know more’), targeting researchers and policy makers. The site aggregates various kinds of open data about the Dutch municipalities, ranging from demographic data to election results:

This first example is built as a traditional website, but my expectation is that the most innovative applications will come in the form of mobile sites and apps for use on smartphones. At the end of 2011, the Dutch government launched a national competition called ‘National App Prize’ to inspire people to develop smart, creative apps based on open data. First winner of the competition is Vistory, an iPhone app that shows pictures and movies about the history of the place, monument,… where you currently are – based on your smartphone’s geo-location. It also allows you to take a picture of the site, compare and overlay it with the historic photo, and share with friends. Here is how it works:

Looking for more examples of innovative apps? Check out appsvoornederland.nl

Open data – under the hood

Sharing of open data goes hand in hand with open standards: uniform methods and formats to access and manipulate data. The Dutch government has chosen a REST (Representational State Transfer) API, with data stored in XML and JSON formats. Modern content management systems based on open source, such as the Hippo CMS used by rijksoverheid.nl, provide out-of-the-box support for RESTful components. This makes it easy to implement multi-channel distribution of content and opens up many other possibilities for further sharing.

Of course data sets are also presented in older formats, in line with the strategy to make as much data available as possible. For more information on the open standards subject see: www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/english

Other examples of sharing is caring

At J. Boye we see ‘sharing is caring’ as a trend in many areas of online business, which is why we’ve chosen it as the central theme for our 2012 conferences in Philadelphia and Aarhus.

In an earlier blog post, Janus gave examples of sharing as a new business model in the museum and higher education world. Some of my earlier posts talked about sharing on the intranet, and especially . sharing in SharePoint. All these stories have a common theme and message: Share your data openly and you will spark creativity and innovation.

How would you use open data in your business?

Do you see opportunities for using open data in your industry? Can you think of creative ways to improve your online products and services by integrating open data?

At the J. Boye Aarhus 12 conference you will be challenged to think out of the box and discuss the subject with other online professionals. Join us from 6 to 8 November 2012 in Aarhus, Denmark for more examples of creativity and innovation!

While Facebook is struggling after what looks like an inflated IPO, LinkedIn is enjoying positive press coverage and appears like the undisputed leader among professional networking sites with 175 million users in 200 countries as of June 2012.

Still, I don't have any plans to join LinkedIn any time soon. Here's my 3 good reasons why

1: LinkedIn lacks security awareness

A massive breach happened in June with 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords said to be accessed and posted online. Security experts came out criticising LinkedIn.

If you followed the story as it happened, you cannot help the impression that LinkedIn did not regain control of passwords. The fact that passwords could be cracked by simple tools suggests that there was a lack of security awareness at LinkedIn. If LinkedIn just invested their fee income from expensive premium services to prevent security leaks!

2: LinkedIn is my 2nd choice and I only have time for 1

If you use one of the alternate professional networking sites, eg. XING, like I do, then it would probably take some very convincing arguments or occasions to get you onto LinkedIn. As my networks circle around people and issues in Middle Europe, I am quite happy with XING, which is the professional network of choice in that region. I once thought about switching when I worked with a UK/US based company.

Another popular alternative to LinkedIn is Viadeo and then on the social media radar screen there's also Google+. Both are interesting. But do I really want to invest in another full profile when my network is somewhere else?

Arguably, to find the right balance with only one profile might be insufficient. Dropping LinkedIn yesterday, trying Google+ today, turning to XING tomorrow – maybe we have to get used to continuous beta, also in our social networks.

3: LinkedIn is purely professional

I still believe and like the fact that private and professional profiles will continue to merge. Why set up a new (so far the LinkedIn strategy) purely professional account, when I have Facebook in place which I can use increasingly for both contacts?

Rather than liking and not liking to merge private and business community, I think it is increasingly becoming a matter of fact. Just see how private smartphone start to enter enterprises through Bring Your Own Device initiatives.

After all, whichever social network you use, it is not the tool, it is the people, the relationships and how much time you invest to make it prosperous and useful.  And who knows what the next big thing for the social networks is? Facebook’s Newest Feature Could Be Banking...

What are your thoughts on profile management? Professional and private. Add your thoughts below.

In a busy working environment, how do you get employees to fill out personal details and enhance their intranet profiles? Apart from having hectic working lifes, cultural issues may also hold employees back. However, without additional details on skills, competences and experience, you have little more than an oldfashioned intranet phone book containing simply e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

At Danish international pharmaceutical company Lundbeck they've managed to integrate their intranet with LinkedIn, so that employee profiles and search results are enriched by LinkedIn data. This means that a search for a specific skill, eg. deep technical knowledge of a particular protein, will also find both new and long-time employees that have the skill posted on their LinkedIn profile.

I spoke to Lundbeck's Web Application Specialist Maria Schmidt Sander to hear more about this innovative project.

The challenge: How to find talent inside the organisation

Many organisations strive to make their employees as effective as possible. That's also the case at Lundbeck, where a stated objective is to create a high performance culture. An important part of this is to be able to find talent inside the organisation.

The traditional approach to finding out if anybody internally have the relevant skills and experience is by consulting HR or relying on interpersonal networks. Unfortunately both approaches have their flaws as most HR departments don't have updated systems to track competencies and interpersonal networks only cover a smaller subset of the organisation.

The solution: Lundbeck Profiles integrated with LinkedIn

As a brand new people directory, Lundbeck Profiles was launched in January 2011 on BrainWeb, the Lundbeck intranet. Aiming to have elaborate profile information, including specialties, past projects, interests, educations and professional experience. Lundbeck Profiles also provides an enhanced search facility to help find people with the right knowledge

Integrated with LinkedIn, Lundbeck has now made finding talent a self-service process without HR involvement and substantially increased the likelihood of actually finding relevant colleagues and competences.

Employees have to allow integration between BrainWeb and LinkedIn manually, so not all employees are yet included. As of writing about 20% of the workforce have connected their employee profile with LinkedIn.

The below example shows Maria's profile which has been connected with LinkedIn:

At first glance this might look like a normal employee profile, but scrolling further down on the page reveals the information pulled from LinkedIn:

The great value lies not so much in the employee profiles themselves, but if you do a search for say organic chemistry or SharePoint as in the below example, then you get a blended results page, where intranet pages are on the left and relevant Lundbeck Profiles are on the right, eg. the names of several research scientists.

What's next for Lundbeck Profiles?

On the intranet roadmap at Lundbeck is to improve the results page when you search for people. They want to make it visually clearer than today and show people on the same level as results from other categories, eg. tools and units, as illustrated from the sketch below:

In addition, they will soon have a workshop focusing on even better usage of the LinkedIn integration and according to Maria, they are hoping to make even better usage of the LinkedIn profile data in the future.

Thanks to Lundbeck for sharing!

If you have any feedback or suggestions for Lundbeck, please feel free to write a comment below.

“Why can’t our intranet be more like Facebook?”
“Our intranet needs to be more social”
“We need to collaborate much more!”

If you are an intranet manager, you have probably heard these or similar questions and statements before – from either colleagues or management.

The perception of the existing intranet is rarely positive if you ask around most organisations. They are typically information heavy, difficult to navigate, not up-to-date and have failed to evolve much; they simply don’t live up to users’ expectations. So how do we move from the much maligned intranet 1.0 towards solutions that meet current user demands?

Not 5 minute changes

Many members in the J. Boye intranet manager groups feel they are trapped in a dark triangle of rising user expectations, cuts on internal communications budgets and demands from management around “getting more out of the intranet by way of among others knowledge sharing, collaboration and supporting business change”.

Some organisations have, however, chosen to face those challenges and made strides in terms of changing their intranets from the static, top-down intranet to a more social and collaborative environment for employees. One example is Scandinavian dairy giant Arla Foods who made their intranet social.

But these are not 5 minute changes. They are complex and often torturous journeys – not just in terms of adapting the technology, but in terms of getting the users onboard and understanding the functionalities and potential value of this new way of working.

Many intranet managers are holding (or being held!) back. Embarking on a process like this is daunting. Where do you start? Digital agencies and self proclaimed experts are busy telling everyone that social is the new black, but many intranet managers have also heard from peers that it is not simply a case of “build and they will come”; that simply adding a bunch of new social tools to the technology stack will do little but confuse users. So what should you do?

Is there a real business benefit?

We strongly advise our members to start by assessing whether any of this would be of any real business benefit to your particular organisation. Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at UK based MWD Advisors has conducted extensive work and research in this area and has compiled a number of useful considerations on how to assess, get started and dos & don’ts backed up by the firm’s ongoing research.

In the 4-stage free webinar “Empower your employees: 6 top tips for Social Intranet success”, she explores the emergence of social intranets, trends and tendencies, technology options, the vendor landscape and highlights a number of current best practices around aligning strategies, change management, adjusting ambitions, integration with existing platforms and other important considerations before you embark on “the social journey”. A good place to start if you are still trying to decide what to do – or if you are evaluating what you have already done. The webinar is accessible directly from the website - no need to register. MWD have also published a more in-depth report for those who want more.

More about the potential of more collaborative intranet solutions and potential pitfalls of going social:

Angela Ashenden will present on collaboration trends at the J. Boye conference in November on the collaboration track.

Recent blog post from J. Boye’s Guy van Leemput on social intranets.

Semantic technologies are a key component in the move towards a better web, but as usual emerging technologies have a much slower uptake than you might think if you listen to analysts and the industry press.

It takes time before they become part of the standard toolbox of ordinary organisations and this is also the case with semantic technologies, which have so far left practitioners stuck with limiting approaches like Dublin Core and clunky content management systems.

Dublin Core comes up short

Dublin Core originated in the library world, with a focus on describing resources. The vocabulary contains a fixed number of terms, that represent what is typically found on library cards, and provides ways to express metadata like author, subject, language, etc. This has been used as a format to provide metadata for web resources, like web pages, video files, photo and images.

But when it comes to the needs of today, we experience two major limitations of Dublin Core:

1. We now want to annotate contents by sprinkling metadata inside web resources, embedded in flexible ways. Dublin Core was not really designed to support that kind of use. As an example, think of an encyclopedia. From a librarian point of view, what you keep metadata about are the individual volumes of, say, Encyclopedia Britannica, resulting in a set of around 20 metadata records. But what we see in Wikipedia is a lot of metadata, not only about each article, but also multiple metadata records within each article. Dublin Core was not designed for this.
2. The fixed terms of Dublin Core prevent us from expressing metadata for most interesting domains. E.g., we want to talk about dates/times, and places, and organisations, and costs, etc. And this is where we see our present-day needs going beyond what Dublin Core can provide us with.

Powerful semantic web technologies can be challenging

Technologies for the semantic web has been with us for more than ten years, and standardised RDF and OWL for nearly 8 years.

These technologies aimed to be "super Swiss Army Knives", sufficient for all kinds of needs. And they are powerful. But practical uptake has not been rapid. There were expectations that we all would quickly take the road to full semantic web content, but those expectations have been scaled down.

There are two main reasons:

1. Tool support has been slow to emerge, and associated methods and process have not yet stabilised
2. There has been much confusion about how a content provider should select suitable areas for semantic modelling, as well as uncertainty about how to make a business case for large scale adoption of semantic web technologies.

We have seen many early adopters of advanced semantic web approaches, but mostly by large organisations with well established information models about their domain. They typically see great value in the reuse of content that semantic web technologies offer. So there are many examples of successful use of powerful semantic web tools and techniques. But for the majority of content providers, uptake of full semantic web technologies has been slow.

Why really bother with semantic technologies?

Think about the Web 2.0 concept. Initially, the reaction was typically "Cool thing, yes, but it is not of any use to us or to our customers". A few years later, all content providers were moving in that direction. Partly because practical tools, frameworks, and platforms became available, and partly because users' preferences clearly indicated that they wanted more than just see ordinary static web content presented on their screens.

The same thing is starting to happen with semantic technologies. Simple tools offers ways to enrich content in a gradual manner, avoiding the need to do large scale modelling of application domains. And by simple means, one can provide the users with more meaningful information and interaction.

The browsers deployed around the world are becoming much better platforms for rich content. The insight is that we are actually seeing a rapid growth in the use of sematic technologies, mainly in the use of light-weight technologies that are simple to use, and that provide concrete value to users.

But this use is mostly not talked about as application of advanced semantic approaches. Rather it is seen as a pragmatical step towards better contents on the web. It is often talked about as "embedding data in web pages", and from that point of view, it has been seen as an evolutionary step taken by an organisation, not a revolutionary step.

The growth in small-scale use of semantic technologies will of course ultimately contribute to later adoption of more powerful semantic technologies. But we do not have to commit ourselves now to heavy technology. Start small now, find the low-hanging fruit, enrich content gradually, learn by doing, ... and then you will be better prepared to tackle more ambitious goals for your web presence.

Developing for a Mobile First world is turning into a very exciting time for architects, developers, and designers of all things digital.  We are creating experiences for devices that have surpassed almost all other forms of media (except possibly traditional television and PCs) in terms of how people consume content.

There is a dynamic ecosystem that we have been tasked to constantly push to the next level at a breakneck pace.  New design patterns and development approaches are rapidly taking hold as we adapt to the changing means in which our users access the applications and sites that we create.

One of the more web-centric approaches to ensure that web content can be consumed by mobile device users is to leverage Responsive Web Design.  In the past two years, this new pattern has taken the user experience world by storm as we look to design a single template to serve to devices of all screen dimensions and orientations.

Like most of us involved with creating “things” for the web, we always look to the next best thing even if it isn’t always the most sustainable simply for the sheer joy in what we do.  As usual, we must sit back and perform a reality check prior to scaling a pattern from our 10-page microsite to a 2000 page website or complex intranet.

Responsive design reality check

Does Responsive Web Design provide real advantages over the traditional “m.” or “.mobi” site that serves up slimmed down content in a mobile web template – especially in cases of very large web properties?  While there are certainly some increased upfront costs in making responsive site, the mid-long term is where your investment will reap its greatest rewards.

The below table shows the key advantages and disadvantages of responsive web design:

A responsive design pattern when creating web assets starts paying off right after delivery by decreasing your continued site development time.  You can be comfortable knowing that all of the users on devices that are hitting your online content are receiving an optimal user experience without adjusting multiple templates and maintaining separate sites.   Your presence is truly “mobile first” as the world rapidly races towards the point that we consume the web more on smartphones and tablets than PCs.  Finally, there are great search engine benefits for your public websites, from both an SEO and usability perspective, when you have accessible content at a single URL for all devices.  This single URL avoids duplicate content, which can be detrimental to your Google ranking since the recent Google Penguin update.  Google has also made an official stand in its support of Responsive Web Design for providing pages to mobile devices.

Upfront you will have a bit more design and front end development costs, along with testing that can become fun across so many different devices and screen sizes.  Also, taking an existing site and “making it responsive” is not the most advisable of approaches due to the paradigm shift to Mobile First.  Finally, keep in mind that the HTML and CSS standards that make all of this responsive stuff possible are still evolving to a certain degree and are not all true standards as of yet, notably the key W3C standards surrounding responsive images are still being hashed out and far from browser implementation.

So as architects, designers, and developers of things for the web, responsive design makes a lot of sense in many cases presented to us.  Not all web assets are necessarily suited for the pattern, but a vast majority are very prime candidates indeed.  When executed properly, providing a ubiquitous experience to your users across many different forms factors and devices will be well worth the effort.  Happy mobilizing!

Learn more about user experience best practices and trends

Sign up the J. Boye Aarhus 12 conference for web & intranet professionals in November, which features a dedicated user experience conference track

Want to know the single most important thing to do to optimize your content migration?  Think through the steps of handling and evaluating content during the website migration.

Unfortunately most focus exclusively on one single step: How to get content from the old system to the new one. A successful migration requires a further five steps.

Six steps of content handling

Here are the six steps of content handling:

1. Sort. Overall what am I going to do with this content (throw it away?  move as-is?  archive?)
2. Place. Where will this content live on the new site?
3. Edit.  Do the words (or other components) need to be edited by a person?
4. Move/Transform. How is the content going to get from the old system to the new one?
5. Enhance. Do I need new metadata, and if so how do I accurately apply that?
6. QA (Quality Assurance). Who or what will be QA'ing, and what standards will we evaluate against?

If you only focus on #4 which is common, then you're missing crucial steps and making the biggest content migration mistake.

Common problems with content migration

Leave out thinking about the migration until the very end (assuming that it's just about moving content from point A to point B) and the whole project may well grind to a halt when things don't join up and fit together after the "migration."  For example, you may find your migration scripts or temporary staff don't know where to put swaths of content, requiring you to scramble to restructure the new site, jettison content, or some other remedy that takes time late in the process (thinking about how content will be placed would prevent that).

A common problem is actually the surprises that arise in relation to quality levels, when for example the editors expected higher quality pages.  For example, if the editorial team feels that the resulting pages are not high enough quality, then the project may need to halt to discuss the overall needs of the migration (which could have been avoided if QA had been planned in more detail).  This often happens since the context in which the content appears will change during a migration.   Instead of simply relying on QA to catch this sort of contextual problem, consider how the other steps will need to handle it.  On example is defining rules for where content should appear in the new IA, rather than finding problems late in the process.

Content migration insider tips

Do not carry out all steps for all content items.  The point is to analyze your existing content, looking for commonality within your content.  For instance, your could opt to treat press releases older than a year differently than new press releases by putting them in an archive section that is plain text whereas the newer press releases have a richer presentation.  You could then consider the six steps for these older press releases, where all steps aside from a sampling for QA could be automated (and the sorting step for example would not need to happen for each content item since it's just applying a rule).  After looking at all the buckets of your content, you can come up with an overall estimate of the manual effort for your migration.

The process of planning the content handling process is dynamic, since there is a constant interplay between quality and cost.  At the beginning you may expect certain quality levels that are too expensive to attain.  For instance, I was working with a large news organization's intranet that would require massive manual editing (the words literally had to be rewritten, with nothing technical about it), and we were able to determine that their original vision would require huge manual effort.  Instead we bucketed content in different ways to do far less manual transformation.  At other times you discover that there is a middle-of-the-road quality level that costs far less but gets 80% of the desired quality.

Learn more about content migration

For more information on the six steps, see Content Handling Process: Asking the Right Content Migration Questions with links to more resources.  Or, for a broader look at planning website migrations see Website Migration Handbook.

Content editing is the heart of Web content management systems, yet have received little attention in the past decade. During CMS product demonstrations, vendors tend to focus instead on nifty marketing features, social media tricks and their mobile features.

Now CMS vendor Ektron, once themselves known more for their text editor than their CMS, have decided to transform the content editing experience within the new version 8.6 of their CMS. Out goes the heavily customized version of the Telerik editor and in comes the HTML5-based Aloha Editor.

Why is content editing so important?

Despite what goes on during the vendor demos, what most people using a CMS spend their time on is entering and editing content. Nearly all content management systems today have a text editor that resembles the Microsoft Word interface inside the browser.

This might sound easy, but the reality has not been pleasant. Many have found the editing experience cumbersome and overwhelming. Some have even created text editor cheat sheets to help their editors. This shouldn't be necessary!

What exactly have Ektron done to their content editing features?

According to Ektron, web content editing is now fun again. Behind the scenes Ektron has created a "provider" model for 3rd party editors in Ektron 8.6. This will eventually allow customers to plug in other 3rd party editors of their choice. With 8.6, Ektron support Aloha in addition to the older editor with prior versions (a heavily customized version of Telerik) for backwards compatibility.

The Aloha editor now powers almost every place inside Ektron where you would edit content, including Ektron's in-context editing UI, SmartForms (structured content editor) and blog comments. According to Ektron's Chief Marketing Officer Tom Wentworth:

It's Aloha everywhere

Ektron has also added some custom functions to Aloha, for example, so a user can browse Ektron's image library and browse for URL links.

What does this mean for your CMS projects?

The renewed focus on content management is good news for CMS professionals. A basic and essential task such as working with content should and can be much easier than what is the case today in most organisations today. Many J. Boye Group members have reversed plans to decentralise content responsibility as they've run into technical challenges with content editing and severe push-back from colleagues over real usability problems.

Much has happened to the Aloha Editor since we first saw it in the summer of 2010. According to Gentics, a small Austria-based CMS vendor that is heading up the Aloha project, other CMS vendors are also looking to integrate Aloha in future versions.

Whether you get to work with the Aloha Editor or some of the many other text editors out there, we recommend that you do everything you can to make your editors happy.

Learn more about content editing

Read a story about Telekom Austria Group which uses Aloha Editor on their intranet. You can also find more on the Aloha Editor website. A free and open source alternative to Aloha is the Create.js project.

You can also continue the conversation in one of our CMS Expert Groups or on the web content management conference track at J. Boye Aarhus 12 in November.

Welcome to our 4th annual list where we identify online professionals that make a difference on Twitter. Mostly they help us learn by sharing insights, but many of them also help challenge conventional wisdom, ask good questions and promote the excellent work of others.

Some write blogs, some are active on the conference circuit, others work in large and complex organizations where they play a key role in identifying new connections and curating knowledge.

For each of them we have selected a tweet to give you a taste of their style and what awoke our curiosity. We'll be watching and so should you. Enjoy!

10 online professionals to watch on Twitter in 2012

1. @angellino: This is Angelo Ioffreda, a creative communication leader and strategist who combines vision, pragmatism, and personal leadership to drive organizational change. Day job as Senior Director, Employee Communications at NII Holdings in Reston, Virginia.
   

   Some provocative ideas here to consider: are you creating friction or flow? http://lnkd.in/CFqD5Z

2. @baoch: Baochi Nguyen recently joined RingCentral, the #1 cloud-based phone system for businesses. At RingCentral, Baochi oversees social strategy and community management. She is currently implementing a superfan and loyalty program, a social CRM platform, and a community curation experience. She spoke at J. Boye Philadelphia 12 on Integrating Social Media Customer Service Successfully Across the Organisation (view slides)
   

   Google+ Creators: Stop Calling It a Social Network | @scoopit http://bit.ly/NLxAB1

3. @dariusmiranda: VP, B2B Social Business Strategy at Wells Fargo Wholesale Bank. He currently partners with business lines across the Wholesale Bank and Wells Fargo’s Experiential Marketing team to research new social and mobile trends, and explore community and collaboration models to connect people with the right information and relevant valued networks—including customer networks.
   

   From what I've seen of ‪#Yammer, it's about easy UI & changing‪#behavior. MS ‪#SharePoint‬ could use some of that. ‪#Collaboration

4. @DennisAgusi: Dennis is responsible for the enterprise social network within Philips and running several projects regarding internal (social intranet, internal video sharing, video blogs, employee engagement, change program, social media guidelines etc.) and external communications (overall social media site that’s coming soon). Meet him in Aarhus in November at the J. Boye conference, where he is speaking on the intranet conference track. 
   

   Text based CV's are so 2011. Check out these creative CV's! http://lnkd.in/R5h58A

5. @ethanmcc : Ethan leads IBM’s global digital and social strategy team responsible for driving the transformation of digital communications and marketing at IBM, leading the development of digital web services & prototyping digital/social programs, deploying digital social intelligence systems, and social business advocacy including the stewardship of IBM’s social computing guidelines.
   

   We're suffering from two things: over disclosure and a lack of transparency." panelist on the topic of corp reputation mgmt.@awpagesociety

6. @jedpc: As the Senior Manager Intranet Initiatives in the Intranet team at BMO Financial Group in Toronto, Jed Cawthorne is part of the Strategic Communications group. His role is split between the longer term strategic view, and the more tactical expediency of manager major intranet initiatives inflight. He recently hosted the kick-off meeting in the Toronto Intranet Group and has a background as a long-time KM, Enterprise Information Management and Enterprise Content Management proponent (and evangelist) going back to his time at the Open University starting in 2004
   

   My monthly article for @cmswire The State of Social Tools within the Enterprise in 2012 http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-bus …

7. @totoroki: An openness spokesperson working for Sitra the Finnish Innovation Fund's web presence. In practice she is in charge of developing Sitra’s web sites, web presence and web working practices. Last years of Karoliina’s work have been about grasping the social communications phenomenon in leveraging Sitra’s insights in different networks and developing Sitra’s fields of work collaboratively with networks. This has meant different team or organization level activities in different social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc.), and of course web strategy work, web policy work, consulting different teams, training sessions etc.
   

   To lighten up this sunny Friday evening, I posted on major Sitra.fi project learnings :) http://opencorporatesite.posterous.com/sitrafi-epilog …‪#sitra.fi ‪#agile‬ ‪#responsive

8. @Msanderhoff: Merete is a researcher at Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark), where she combines her passion for art history, digital media and open access. She has been leading a number of projects concerned with providing open access to the museum’s digitized collections, and using digital media to freely share knowledge and resources with fellow institutions as well as users. She helped coin our 2012 conference theme of "Sharing is caring" and spoke at the Philadelphia 12 conference on Sharing is Daring. Openness as a Business Strategy (view slides)
   

   More on how @StatensMuseum is sharing, and what director Karsten Ohrt says http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Studies/H …‪#ctm12‬ ‪#CreativeCommons

9. @RoslynLayton: Roslyn is currently a digital strategy consultant to the telecom industry working at Strand Consult. Building on her career in digital marketing and business development with companies in the U.S., Europe, Brazil, and Japan, she has just started an industrial PHD project titled “The New Economics of Telecom: How Over the Top Players Disrupt Business Models and Regulation”. She is also the author of one of our most popular 2012 blog postings titled Stop wasting money in Facebook
   

   A new life for laid-off Nokia employees. Former employees try to do with a startup what they could not do inside Nokia.

10. @greentrac: Tracy Green is the Head of Online Services in the UK Parliament where she is responsible for the website, intranet and other digital channels including social media. In a role that allows her to combine a fascination with politics together with a love for technology, Tracy is relishing the opportunity to have a real impact on the way Parliament works in the UK.
    

    Such an inspiring afternoon thinking about what's possible on tablet devices!

You can find all 10 on this public Twitter list - thanks to Mikkel Højbjerg for doing it.

30 more online professionals on Twitter

This is the 4th year we are doing this list. See:

• 10 online professionals to watch on Twitter in 2009
• 10 online professionals to watch on Twitter in 2010
• 10 online professionals to watch on Twitter in 2011

and you will find 30 interesting people that are going places and will make your Twitter experience more insightful. You can also follow me @janusboye. I won’t take it personally if you quickly decide to “unfollow” me!

Who did we miss on Twitter?

This list is based on internal input as well as friendly suggestions from members of the J. Boye Groups in Europe and North America. As always, please do drop recommendations below if you think we have left out a Twitter user that deserves the attention of web and intranet professionals.

Content management systems have been around for more than a decade, but still buyers keep getting caught by surprise as they find expected common and out-of-the-box functionality missing in their chosen Web CMS.

One frequently sought solution is to include everything in the Request-for-Proposal to avoid surprises like this, but as many buyers have learned, this solution rarely works in practice as vendors know their way around this process.

While the usual problems with a young and immature industry remain, here is a list of minimum essential functionality that emerged from a recent meeting in the CMS Expert Group.

Essential features for a modern CMS

1. Separation of content and presentation
2. Rich text editing
   1. Without compromising separation of content and presentation
3. Multi-delivery to different platforms
   1. Including mobile and printer-friendly
4. Multi-lingual                
   1. At least western European charset  / UTF8
   2. Some way to handle sites in multiple languages
5. Broken links checker
6. Access control lists
   1. E.g restricting who can view/edit certain areas
7. Automatic handling of change in navigation / site structure
8. Automatic content import
   1. Eg. RSS / XML feeds
9. Short, meaningful, friendly URLs
   1. without file extensions (e.g. .aspx)
   2. and extremely short URLs

How does your CMS stack up?

Did you find the above list shorter than expected? Feel free to add your additional expectations below. Also, please share if and where your CMS came up short.

What do you do when your online presence keeps expanding with websites, campaign sites and new online channels, but your resources (surprise!) stay the same? So far to most the futile answer has been to try to maintain and update the ever-growing mountain of sites and content. But that’s a battle you will eventually lose as many have found with bad and uncontrollable content; content that is forgotten, cases of no-one remembering why the site was launched initially, and no-one taking responsibility for the content.

The new and better answer that increasingly is appearing in many organisations here in 2012 is to take a more radical approach: To go from too many websites to simply 1.

Does it really make sense to have so many different websites?

In a not too distant past, each division, each campaign, and everything else with a budget, wanted their very own website, too often also on separate domains. This is what made sense from an internal point-of-view, just like it used to make sense to have many different brochures.

Now we live in a different time and with organisations facing the expensive consequences of having multiple content management systems and different agencies, the question whether this really makes sense is now not only a valid one to ask, but has also become a business critical one.

Across governments and the private sector around the world, numerous ambitious web projects are on the way, to bring down the number of websites. This will have substantial internal advantages as the number of CMS's and agencies goes down, but even more importantly, it also brings many benefits to the citizens and customers visiting the new consolidated website.  In short: Users no longer need to figure out your organisational chart to navigate your website.

Raise the quality by reducing the number of pages

Another benefit of going to simply 1 website is that the overall amount of content tends goes down.

When you have too many websites, you probably also have redundant, outdated and trivial content. With some effort you can use these 3 tips to raise the content quality:

• get rid of content that should not have been there in the first place
• get rid of overlapping content - merge similar content to the same pages
• focus on adding a few lines where needed to existing pages - even though it might not fit perfectly. This is easier for the editors than creating new pages and keeps the number of pages down

One website fits all

Yes, simply having 1 website means that you need to still produce all kinds of information to many different audiences.  You still have very different information about very different topics and also many different tasks that the users would expect to solve.

Yes, it requires careful planning and hard work to create a good user experience to avoid congestion and have a meaningful information architecture.

And yes, it certainly requires an easy-to-use and modern content management system that don't require that occasional editors need to attend week-long training before they can contribute to the website.

Going to one website, most likely also requires big changes in how you work and how you are organized. This tends to be the biggest challenge for most. Not information, not design and not technology.

Having said this, it can work. Some good examples are:

• rijksoverheid.nl - one website for all of Dutch government
• Siemens - one website for all the German multinational conglomerate company with 360,000 employees divided in 19 divisions

Learn more about going away from having too many websites

Last year my colleague Brian Bentzen wrote: Governments have too many websites.

Ann Priestly also wrote an interesting posting on whether everything on a website can be reduced to tasks. Read: Slash and burn: service delivery vs content

Unlike websites which typically don't have designated names, many intranets carry a special name that is used to brand the intranet. These names tend to stick and we've rarely heard of them changing, but if you don't yet have a name for your intranet, what are the typical options?

As the below listing of intranet names around the world shows, there are many different types of names in use. Some of these names originates deep within the IT department where the intranet was born many years ago, while others are the result of a communication department or even an internal contest to find the best name.

Intranet names around the world

• Aalborg Kommune: Klik
• Adidas: adiweb
• Arla: My Workplace
• Aviva: Aviva World
• BBC: Gateway
• Chr. Hansen: C-Net
• Coca Cola: iConnect
• Copenhagen Business School: CBSshare
• Fondazione Edmund Mach: FEM4me
• HSH Nordbank: My Port
• IBM: w3
• J. Boye: Intrapedia
• LEGO: LEGO Web
• Lundbeck: BrainWeb
• MAN Diesel & Turbo: Compass
• Manpower Switzerland: InsideManpower
• March of Dimes: Dimension
• McDonalds: Access MCD
• Mercedes Benz: Pitstop
• Microsoft: Microsoft Web
• Nestlé: Henri
• Oxfordshire County Council: Insite
• Rabobank: Meeting point
• SABMiller: WEBrew
• Securex: Intranet
• Siemens: SieWeb
• SimCorp: SimLink
• Smithsonian: PRISM
• UNHCR: UNHCR-net
• Valtech: Valtech Now
• Vestas: The Hub
• Wärtsila: Compass
• WWF: Connect

What's the name of your intranet?

Please do help others by sharing the name of your intranet. Drop a comment with new additions or changes and then we will keep the list updated.

Next steps for your intranet

• Learn from the best: Not yet registered for the intranet conference track at J. Boye Aarhus 12? Then secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Intranet killer applications are often discussed – and compared! – in our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America.
• How does your intranet measure up? We’ll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!