Intranet Portal Design
Cultural compatibility through good design “makes the difference.”
A good portal design “makes the difference” with staff adoption, acceptance and cultural identity. Logical navigation and taxonomy coupled with elegant branding elements will ease the impact of change the intranet may impose on staff. Striking a balance between a design based on business structure and one based on day-to-day tasks is critical in achieving an effective portal. A good design will portray the message "One Company, One Way of Working".
Good design principles underpin a good Information Architecture (IA) and set the foundation for how content and portal sites are structured.
The core principles outline high level objectives organisations seek to achieve with their IA and do not specifically cover technology related issues (like integration) – technical issues are resolved during the design phase.
Core principles may include:
Goals of good design
At a high-level, the goals of a good design are to deliver a framework and portal strategy to:
- Outline an improved way of accessing content areas using a task-based approach to navigation.
- Support collaborative “workloads”, from highly managed organisational documents and records, to project and team-base workspace through the user-managed workspaces called MySites. This is discussed in more detail below.
- Support personalisation. This will allow users to personalise some predefined page areas with content that pertains to them and their role.
- Content targeting. This will target content and access to specific areas of the portal based on the user’s role.
Seamless, easy to use and manage
The key to this core principle is to improve the usability of the portal and to individualise the content to the context of the current user and potentially their role. Specifically, these are achieved by implementing the following information architecture approaches:
- Task-based approach to navigation to help find services. The aim of this is to make everyday tasks more visible at the top level of navigation. For the benefits of using this approach, please contact Connected Systems for more detail.
- Personalisation approach to content. The aim of this is to deliver only what the user is interested in seeing or only what’s relevant. To view this approach in more details, please contact Connected Systems.
Easy to collaborate
Good design ensures collaboration is easy. Allowing small workgroups or cross-functional teams to collaborate is critical to the modern-day porta - the outcome is more productive and relevant sharing of information. Teams can focus on tasks related to their projects and deal less with managing information (e.g. a one-stop-shop for progress reporting, meeting calendars, minutes, etc).
The model Connected Systems has created is based on a “fit-for-purpose” model of collaboration called “Workloads”.
The Workload model allows for the flexibility of differing requirements and maps these collaboration requirements to application templates and pluggable components.
Good design brings together these workloads to facilitate a seamless “Portal” experience for the user. This can be designed and developed using SharePoint and our design outline the components that makeup each workload. Each workload scenario is delivered using a concept called “Workspaces” – which is the implementation of a workload scenario using the portal technology.
For more information about how this works and what it looks like, please contact Connected Systems.
Easy to find and Search
Influenced by the consumer search experience, today’s information workers expect to find what they need when and where they need it. If it’s not on the first results page then the user perceives search as not working or returning too many hits. IT Professionals understand the experience users want, but they often feel overwhelmed with the complexity involved in meeting these expectations in an enterprise environment.
Search is often under utilised within organisations. Good design increases the role of search and with the addition of People search and integration with some line-of-business data, search in the portal will be a try enterprise search solution.
All facets of search can be used; functionality like wildcards, keywords and enhanced metadata search, to facetted or search-within search and improving the relevance of results; this with raise the bar to a level most users would expect from an enterprise search solution.
Easy to protect and secure
The SharePoint security model supports role-based security where member of the workspace can have separate or shared-roles for managing content. Individuals will be able to manage their own security of personal sites and personal information that get to see which user attributes. For example, if a user only wanted people within their own team to see their home phone number they could grant this level of access.
Item-level security is also supported; this allows for the most granular security possible as security is set on indivual content items.
For more information on this and other parts of the "Good design" strategy, please contact Connected Systems.