Content management systems for Intranets
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720010804140 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Pages | 46-50 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | Martin White |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
46 — VINE 124
Content management
systems for Intranets
by Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd
This article looks at the issues that need to be
considered in spe cifying and purchas ing
content managem ent software for an Intranet.
The differences between the content
management requ irements of a web site an d
those of an Intranet are emphasised, and
guidance is provid ed on the selection of a
software supplie r
Introduction
Even in these days of gigabyte hard drives most of
us still have a filing cabinet full of all those docu-
ments, press cuttings, memos and forms that for a
brief period of time seemed absolutely essential to
store for future use. Indeed many of these items
have subsequently turned out to be of some ben-
efit, but usually only after we have worked our
way through the entire cabinet trying to remember
just where we put that particular conference paper
and then realised that it was in the bound proceed-
ings on the shelf above the cabinet.
Too many Intranets have the same problem. They
started life as a good idea over a meeting and
someone “volunteered” to act as the Intranet
manager and sort out a content structure for the
Intranet. This member of staff also probably ended
up adding the more complex documents and
chasing people to update their pages, but without
any diminution of their current workload, and with
no budget. The end result is a sort of Intranet
“black hole”, into which content is poured, never
again t o be seen on a desktop.
For the last three years I have attended the
Intranets Conferences sponsored by Online Inc. in
the San Francisco area of the United States. At the
first conference in 1999 everyone was just relieved
to find that there were no easy solutions to Intranet
deployment. In 2000 the emphasis was very much
on content that would encourage use of the
Intranet, but in 2001 there was a realisation that no
matter how relevant the content was in principle, if
it could not maintained and retrieved then the
return on the Intranet investment was minimal. A
significant number of the papers were therefore on
how to management content, and the selection and
deployment of Intranet content management
solutions.
Web sites and Intranets
To state that the only commonality between a web
site and an Intranet is that they both use HTML is
perhaps a slight overstatement, but not by much.
Intranets do not benefit from the intensive use of
graphics, need versatile search functionality, tend
to be broad rather than deep, and have to cope with
a wide range of document formats, most of which
have not been explicitly written for web publish-
ing. In addition web sites are usually maintained
by a small team of specialists with responsibility
for content creation and management, and they
have a budget, even if a small one.
It is usually recognised that as many staff as
possible should be able to contribute content to the
Intranet, but apart from providing basic courses in
Front Page little more is done. The end result is
that there are wide variations in terminology and
document format. On one Intranet I was looking at
recently the minutes from a monthly meeting had
five different titles on the Intranet, because no one
appreciated the importance of clear and explicit
document titles. Then there was a document
headed “Example letter” which had no further
information associated with it, and because it was
a PDF file it was not indexed and took 30 seconds
or so to load just in order to find out what it was
all abou t.
Probably the most important difference between a
web site and an Intranet is that you have to have
100% trust in an Intranet. Most people will look at
a number of different web sites in order to cor-
roborate information, but with an Intranet there is
no option. Within three clicks of a mouse, includ-
ing the home page, you need to be at certain that
either the information you want is available
through the Intranet, or it is not. That requires a
very high degree of content management to ensure
that relevant and reliable information is easy to
publish and easy for a user to locate.
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