Crafting an Intranet: The Art and Practice of Creating a Successful Corporate Portal

A Guide to the Soft Skills You Need to Ensure a Successful Project

Compiled from more than a decade worth of experience building successful intranets, this NEW booklet provides guidance and insight into the less obvious, but critical skills that go into achieving success in any portal project.

If you like the self-help guidance and decision trees in the SHAREPOINT SHEPHERDS GUIDES FOR END USERS, you’ll love this new resource called Crafting an Intranet: The Art and Practice of Creating a Successful Corporate Portal.  The SharePoint Shepherd’s mission is to help businesses achieve success utilizing SharePoint.  We facilitate organizational change and improve end user engagement and adoption of SharePoint to help organizations capitalize on their technology investments.  Therefore, we’re committed to providing you the tools and information that you need to be successful.

The 54-page booklets are professionally bound and printed to withstand repeated use and intended to be used as a guide for anyone tasked with building the information architecture, content, or end-user training as part of a corporate intranet project.  Focused on engagement of all stakeholders across the organization, this is another one of those simple tools we’ve found valuable in helping people achieve success using SharePoint.

We welcome your feedback about the issues your business and your users are facing with SharePoint. We are continuously looking for opportunities to help improve SharePoint adoption and user productivity. If an upgrade to SharePoint 2013 is in your future, now is the time to consider the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users: 2013!

Introduction

Follow the Shepherd

The Shepherd’s Guide for End Users

The Cost of Changing to SharePoint

• It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better
• Shrinking the Trough
• Open, Honest and Direct Communication
• Targeted Training
• On the Other Side

 4 Tips for Engaging Your Executives in SharePoint

• It’s Not About SharePoint
• Find a Real, Tangible Business Problem
• Propose a Solution
• Do Your Part

SharePoint Un-ROI

• Keeping ROI Simple
• Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
• Un-ROI

Building Trust on Your SharePoint Team

• What is Trust?
• Trust Your Coalition
• Trust Your Users

Drawing a Target on Your Users with SharePoint

• One Size Fits All
• In-Part Personalization
• Peacock of Parts
• Pages for People
• Drawing the Target

Creating Reuseability in Your User Interface Design

• The Problem
• Reuse Defined
• Reuse in the User Interface
• The Tools
• The Shim
• IFRAME
• User Controls
• Web Controls and Web Parts
• Web Services and XSLT
• Dynamic HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets
• The Pitfalls
• Patchwork Quilt
• Poor Availability of Systems
• Paradigms and Culture
• Putting It Together

A Sensible Framework for Intranet Navigation (using SharePoint)

• Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds
• Interstate Travel
• City Streets
• Subdivision Drives
• The Impact of Search
• Putting the Framework Together

5 Tips for Measuring the Success of Your SharePoint Implementation

• Know What Measurement Is
• Measure as Close to the End Goal as Possible
• Use Sampling to get Close to Total Business Value
• Use the Hard Numbers to Validate Your Estimates
• Look for Unique Ways to Get Valuable Answers

About the Author

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