New BBC homepage

BBC Gateway homepage

So what’s been happening? Well loads actually. We go live with a redesigned Gateway homepage tomorrow at 8am, following lots of planning and activities behind the scenes. The result is very diifferent to what we currently have and this new design clearly meets three objectives;

• Communicate.

• Collaborate.

• Do stuff.

Now I could have provided you all with the extremely boring business objectives that we needed to meet, and were part of our business case and you can see them if you want, but these three sum them up. I don’t particularly like business bingo speak, so let’s not run unnecessary stuff up the flagpole and see what synergies emerge. Let’s keep it simple.

In addition we’ve done some content removal too. I have some impressive figures I could share, but won’t bore you with. Except maybe for one; we’ve reduced 78 glossaries to two. And that’s still one too many.

There are lots of other figures that I will keep to myself for the time being and use when the bosses ask how we’re getting on.

Now you’re probably wondering what the journey was to get to where we are, and what the end result looks like?

Well firstly we followed the established journey of research, design, refine, redesign, review and publish. Did we spend enough time and thoroughness at each stage? Probably not.  But you know what? It’s technology – if it isn’t right we can change it quickly enough.

What does the end result look like? Well I can’t show you that I’m afraid, not until after we’ve officially gone live. Over the past few weeks we’ve been sharing what we plan to launch with any BBC employees who were interested our work in progress so I wouldn’t be surprised if its already available somewhere on the internet, but you will have to wait another few days to see it here.

Once we’ve gone live we will go through a review period and invite BBC users to tell us what they think, then agree what we will deliver as part of the next phase.

Simple really.

Is Sharepoint the way to go for an intranet homepage?

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?