Is Sharepoint the way to go for an intranet homepage?
Posted by Phil Edwards on July 16, 2009
We’re about to take a deep breath and decide what to do with our intranet homepage. We don’t know yet, but we’re doing some user research and hopefully that’ll give us a feel for how well the current homepage is doing in terms of delivering user needs. Also we’ll get a feel for what users expect from the homepage going forward.
Then will come the challenge in delivering what’s needed. We have Sharepoint in the company so it would seem to make sense to use it wouldn’t it?
But what have been your experiences of using Sharepoint as the basis for your homepage? Good/Bad/Indifferent?
Who has their intranet homepage hosted and delivered via Sharepoint?
And what functionality have you implemented using Sharepoint on your homepage? Does it work? Has it made your organisation more effective?
markmorrell said
Phil,
BT would not consider SharePoint for our homepage for these reasons:
1. SharePoint is inaccessible.
2. Microsoft RSS isn’t easy to share so users can’t subscribe to updates.
3. Embedding of video is difficult.
4. These are easier, cheaper, publishing tools to use.
5. SharePoint 2010 doesn’t look like making governance any easier.
Mark
Luc de Ruijter said
Hi
The usual problem with any innovative project these says is that the questions are IT-driven. Start thinking about your content. IT will come later.
I have never seen a good Sharepoint implementation, not because SPPS isn’t up to the job, but because organizations are not paying attention to their content.
I advise companies with their information.
Luc de Ruijter
information irrigation
meta creation
digital communication
Heather said
On the other hand, one of my clients has implemented a popular intranet using MOSS2007. The company that developed it quite rightly forced them to think about structure & content, needs of the users and governance before they would touch the technology.
That said, they went that route because (a) they could get MOSS licenses for next to nothing, and (b) anything (literally anything) had to be better than what they had before!
andyham said
We do think sharepoint is the way to go for internet sites and we have been doing portals on MOSS for ages. Over time the barriers of the past have been brought down as more and more rich quality design work has gone into producing great looking branded intranets, with all the MOSS functionality of course, but looking and feeling good as well. Have a look our new blog here http://andyham.wordpress.com/ where you can see for yourself a great example of a recent project we did for a charity in Scotland. You can also follow on to see some of the top Internet Facing websites now coining out such as Ferrari, Carlesberg etc.
Having sharepoint in the company is the key starting point we find, as then, like many of our clients, you can tap into the skills and experience you have already developed and keep internal and external activities on the same platform, it works great for IT but it’s really the LOB guys who are driving this momentum as far as we can see.
Andy
http://www.comapny-net.com
carolinejaneward said
I have been looking at Jive and it comes across as a much more dynamic intranet application.
http://www.jivesoftware.com/products
As far as I can see it does similar function to SharePoint and from a social perspective.