You want an intranet that helps staff collaborate and share information. But, advises Martin Amm, there are several process errors that can keep your intranet from success.

• Mistake #1: Assuming a one-size-fits-all home page will meet everyone's needs.
• Mistake #2: Creating a one-way communication platform.
• Mistake #3: Delaying deployment until absolutely every department's requirements are met.
• Mistake #4: Having multiple sign-ons.
• Mistake #5: Downplaying the importance of integration.
• Mistake #6: Overlooking the importance of workflows.
• Mistake #7: Dismissing Web 2.0's role in the enterprise.
• Mistake #8: Designing the intranet in an IT ivory tower.
• Mistake #9: Minimizing the importance of robust search.

Link to full article at CIO.com.

Kraig Swensrud is the Sr. Director of Marketing Products at Salesforce.com. Recently he developed 7 best practices to help marketers adapt to "Marketing in the Google Era."

Marketing in the Google Era Part 1 - Seven Proven Techniques for Marketing in the 21st century - Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce Marketing: https://admin.acrobat.com/_a13852757/p59236471/

Marketing in the Google Era Part 2 - Secrets of the Salesforce.com Marketing Machine  - Sean Whiteley, Andrea Wildt: https://admin.acrobat.com/_a13852757/p20952289/

Good podcast interview with Alex Wright, IA for NY Times.

From Gartner (23 January 2008):

“Leading-edge organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve their employees’ abilities to innovate and create, and information architecture plays a critical role. Listen as Gartner analyst Whit Andrews speaks with Alex Wright - information architect for the New York Times and author of the recent book, Glut - about some of the trends and technologies that will be the focus of his keynote address at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in Baltimore, MD from March 26th to March 28th, 2008.”

Website: http://www.gartner.com/it/products/podcasting/asset_193438_2575.jsp

This week, I received an email from a domain registrar in Hong Kong. He was inquiring about a Chinese company wanting to register some domain names and an “Internet Brand” based on Trapeze Group.  I’d never heard of Internet branding in China and was curious. This is the description from his email:

“Internet Brand is the name of a kind of popular and convenient domain name in China, also known as “Internet Keyword”. The form of it is different from a traditional domain name; it has no prefix “www.” and no postfix”.com”. Simply input “Internet Brand” into IE Address bar and users can get the destination website directly.”

“The laws and regulations to register and manage Internet Brands are the same as Cn domain names.  If it is registered successfully, it will have an electronic certificate send to our government, for guaranteeing  unique registration. “
“Internet Keywords must be registered only through the registrars accredited by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in China.”

Now, both IE and Firefox (and I assume other browsers) have this feature built in already. The choice of search engine is up to the user. This is something specific to China. Another Website says:

“Once your Internet Brand is registered, it can obtain full support from a nation-wide portal website and well-known search engines. At present, more than 2000 portal websites such as sina.com, sohu.com, 263.net, baidu.com, search.com.cn, china.com, TOM.com, and local information port have fully provided this feature, covering more than 90% of Internet users in China. “

So from what I understand…

Chinese portal sites that are registered with the government have access to this “Internet Brand” database. If I register my company, Trapeze Group, and a user in China enters “Trapeze Group” in their address bar and does the search, it would send them directly to our Website.

For our type of business, the only customer in China is the government, so not a huge concern; however, let’s use Pepsi for example…

If Petsi Cola (fictitious name) registers Pepsi as an Internet Brand, then traffic would go to Petsi Cola rather than Pepsi Cola. Did I mention it is first com, first serve and you cannot contest it in court? So, all this business is now being taken away from Pepsi Cola and going to Petsi Cola. Profits go down for Pepsi, and Petsi Cola has their best year ever!

Every month I do a report for our corporate Web program at Trapeze Group. One of the things that makes up part of my report is going through Web requests via form and email. Our info@ email is the mailbox that acts as a first point of contact, and it also receives the most spam. One of the things I’ve noticed is the enormous volume of resumes we get from India. None of them have any intention of working here, instead they would tele-work from India. We do have a careers@, but they don’t use it. I’m led to believe someone has some sort of email spamming device that sends to a list of info@ emails. How do I know this? In the email, the non-generic words are set to a different font face and size a-la “fill in the blank”.

It’s also interesting to see how “reverse engineering” is featured in is cover letter. Not a good fit for us.

Did I mention this one particular candidate I’m referring to was interested in Human Factors? Maybe if he made a kick-butt Saag Paneer, I’d give him a chance.

An email on one of the listserves came up with the following:

Someone came on to a large scale project in mid stream. It was built in Java and used some open source pieces. The usability is poor, and the audience is made up of users with minimal computing experience. A large effort and significant investment has been made by existing stakeholders, and  it would be difficult to pitch it all out and start again.

What to do?

My response was:

You need to get quick wins that are small. There is no chance you’ll get it all, but make sure you document the crap out of everything for the next version. Just because you don’t do it in this one, does not mean you can’t introduce it in successive iterations. If we made perfect software, we would not make any money on maintenance. It will be a challenge, but make sure you can document use cases where the design can be problematic. You can approach it by suggesting that you know that significant changes can’t be made at this time, but there are the risks and consequences, and should be revisited on the next release. They can even promote an enhanced UX for the next release.

The team leaders will not feel that you are condescending, they will feel you are contributing to the project and demonstrating a will to improve and commit to making the project a success.

What a great application. I’ve always felt uninspired by sites like Facebook and MySpace. I don’t want to put up pictures of “questionables” for everyone to see, and I don’t particularly like the voyeurism associated with it. I’m not saying these are bad, they are simply not for me. So when I discovered Crowdvine, I was rather pleased - here is a great concept that serves a particular niche just about perfectly. It generates buzz and you get to interact with others in your industry in a totally different way. The conference tool works well and I’m going to investigate it further. There are many examples out there; I discovered it through the IA Summit Website.

Good Job!

I didn’t see this coming, well at least not this soon. It goes to show how MS is worried about Google (Ads and Apps), and how they are having little success with Windows live. If they were able to lump Windows Live with Yahoo, they could give Google a serious run for their money.

The full letter can be found here.

Steve Ballmer list the synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

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With the combined resources, experience, and talent, I believe they would be a very capable competitor. How they choose to execute their strategy in the event of a merger is ultimately up to them.