Managing the Intranet: trying a new tool
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720010804131 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Pages | 36-45 |
| Author | Anne Ramsden,David Turpie,Jonathan Rea |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
36 — VINE 124
Managing the Intranet:
trying a new tool
by Anne Ramsden, IT Projects
Manager; David Turpie, Projects
Officer; Jonathan Rea, IT Support,
Open University Library
A case study is des cribed of how the Open
University Library is developing a pilot
departmental Intranet with the open sourc e
package, Zope and the Content Managem ent
Framework toolkit. The approach is to
manage and share content held in a varie ty
of formats, develop workflow for creating an d
approving new co ntent before it is publish ed to
the site, separate content from presentation i n
order to support eas y maintenance and
consistency , and locate information through
metadata and full text retrieval. Designing the
Intranet involved content mapping and
identifying library staff’s working needs before
developing the struc ture and site framewo rk.
The Zope CMF has proved to be a highly
flexible set of tools for creating a knowledge
sharing Intranet, but the drawbacks are lack of
documentation and training in the UK.
Introduction
The Open University Library is building a Library
staff Intranet using an open source content man-
agement system called Zope, which enables the
collaborative creation and management of dynamic
Web portals. Zope was first described by Paul
Browning in an earlier issue of Vine before the
launch of the new Content Management Frame-
work (CMF) toolkit by the Zope developers, Zope
Corporation, in early 2001.1 Thi s is an o ut-of-
the-box, no-cost solution for managing and sharing
content held in a variety of formats (HTML, PDF,
Word, etc.), which unifies the content through
metadata, and supports easy workflow and web
publishing – ideal for managing an Intranet site for
knowledge sharing.
The Intranet we have in mind will serve all library
staff (currently 80) and provide them with
everything for enhancing communications in
the Library, speeding up processes and saving
time. This is an opportunity to automate some of
the mundane tasks, keep staff posted about news,
policies and procedures, reports, minutes, and
events; provide collaboration tools to create
communities of practice; and deliver information
which can othe rwise b e hard t o find. We plan to
engage other user groups also within the Open
University at a later stage, so the site will become
increasingly sophisticated and dynamic. In order to
avoid the Intranet becoming unwieldy and to
address issues, such as redundancy of information
and st atic pages , a Libr ary Intran et team was
appointed to take this forward and review the
content management solutions. The team has two
representatives from the IT Support & Develop-
ment Group, a computing student on placement
with the Group, and two “user” representatives
from two other Library Groups (Information
Management and Directorate).
The project will deliver a departmental Intranet
which will link into the University’s main connect-
ing Intranet, but which will also form part of a
larger programme of Library projects looking at
knowledge management within the library and the
University.
The key considerations for the new Intranet
were:
Through-the-Web management of the
Intranet site;
Ease the Webmaster/publishing bottleneck
by devolving management of content to
library groups;
Create an information structure and
submission system to ensure regular
updating and user confidence in the
content;
Managers and staff mu st be ab le to
contribute, update and manage content on
the site without specialist skills such as
HTML skills;
Support easy workflow - to be able to
submit, approve, publish, review, retract and
finally remove content;
Schedule when content goes live and when
it is to be removed;
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