Back in November 2011 we launched a global competition, open to all charities and non-profit organisations to win a free Interact Intranet software package for their organisation. We had so many entries that we decided to give two free intranet’s away – one to a UK charity and one to a US charity!

After much deliberation with the judges that included Sam Marshall, owner of ClearBox Consulting – independent intranet consultancy and Mark Morton, Digital Media Manager of Epilepsy Action, we finally managed to decide on two deserved winners!

North Devon Hospice, a charity supporting individuals and families who are faced with the impact of a terminal illness, were awarded the UK winner. It was such a close call but finally the judges decided on North Devon Hospice as they thought Interact Intranet would be able to provide them with a collaborative social intranet platform for their remote workers to discuss and share information 24/7, which is crucial for the charity who have a community nursing team who work across a large geographical area and are often isolated from news, events and processes.

Judge, Sam Marshall said that, “all of the charities were very worthwhile causes, but North Devon stood out for the sheer enthusiasm for the work that they do and the breadth of the ideas that they put forward.” He commended their, “clear vision of the multiple ways in which Interact Intranet could help them progress and of all the submissions they seemed best-placed to take a new intranet and really run with it.”

North Devon Hospice were ‘over the moon’ when told they were winners. Gordon Lester, CEO of North Devon Hospice told us:

We are really thrilled about winning this competition.  We’re looking forward to rolling out an intranet for the charity and also the opportunity to work with Interact.  We work remotely across the length and breadth of North Devon, caring and supporting our patients and their families.  An intranet means our nursing teams can work across the rural area with the hospice in their pocket, that we can better communicate between our 12 charity shops, that we can generally stay in touch with each other with more ease and refine our processes, making us more efficient…the list just goes on.

On behalf of all at North Devon Hospice and the patients and families we care for, we would like to thank Interact for this amazing opportunity and wonderful charitable gesture.”

We are going to feature a series of blogs with the progress of North Devon Hospice’s intranet over the coming months, make sure you subscribe to our blog >>

Read the full press release here >>

See how a collaborative intranet can help your charity >>

The US winner of the competition will be announced over the coming weeks.

Winner of charity intranet competition announced is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

Nigel explained that as one of the UK’s leading providers of integrated facilities management solutions, Romec faced a number of difficulties including no single communications source and a reliance on bulk emails, leading to knowledge silos throughout the company.

Romec had a number of specific objectives for their intranet including:

• Reducing knowledge silos
• Improve communication between the 4,500 workforce and reduce the reliance on the internal email system
• Implement an easy-to-use intranet solution, suitable for non-technical staff
• Engage remote workers with a low bandwidth version of the intranet available

During his talk Nigel explained some of the tools that he had implemented from Interact, which helped fulfil his objectives. In particular he discussed how the collaboration tool ‘comments on documents’ led to a far flatter structure in Romec, with front line employees now using the intranet to ask questions directly to managers and getting a faster response as a result. A big improvement from previous top-down communication.

This is increasingly leading us to break down the knowledge silos Romec has had in the past and allowed for a reduction in emails.”

A great story Nigel shared was how Romec implemented an innovative ‘treasure hunt’ style competition to launch the intranet to their company. Romec designed the competition to get users familiar with how to navigate through the many features of the new intranet including the search, electronic forms and employee directory.They put up teaser posters across 1,800 offices and a series of countdown emails were deployed. We learnt that to ensure a high user uptake in the competition every Romec employee received a postcard to their home along with a letter and VPN password if they weren’t able to access a work computer.  This also ensured employees without company technology weren’t being left out or left behind.

 

The Romec intranet is now a one-stop shop for communication and collaboration, providing people with a transparent way of working together.”

After having their new intranet for over 2 years, Nigel told us about the many benefits the intranet has bought to Romec:

• Internal communication in Romec has been transformed via Interact Intranet’s ease of use
• The electronic forms have saved Romec on average £10,000 per form since implementation
• Rapid, direct feedback is achieved by all from the comments boxes
• There has been a huge increase in participation in company campaigns
• Company information is now searchable, usable, dynamic and timely
• There has been a 30% reduction in internal emails
• The Purchase Ledger team of three have saved approx. 114 hours per month
• The IT Helpdesk team have saved approx. 25 hours per month
• Use of the Employee Directory has led to 70% less internal calls to the reception
• The use of the Preferred Supplier Database contained within Romec’s intranet has led to £80,000 a year company savings

Book your space at the London Intranet Fundamentals seminar where Ayesha Graves from Waterstones will be presenting her intranet >>

Romec share their intranet success story at Interact seminar is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

The opening session started with Nicolas Rolland (@NicolasROLLAND) of Danone and Jerome Colombe (@sYsIphe) of Alcatel-Lucent talking about Models for Social Business Transformation. One of the challenges that Danone face is how do they connect with all of their employees when 60,000 out of 100,000 of them don’t have a PC? They are introducing video into the workplace so their audience can share and collaborate on their own devices such as smartphones and still feel part of the organisation.

We then moved onto how difficult it is to measure social interactions between people with Dr Alexander Richter (@arimue) from CSCM, Peter Kim (@peterkim) from the Dachis Group and Guillaume Guerin from Lecko.

3 key questions were raised:

1. Why do we want to measure?
2. How do we measure social activity?
3. What level should we measure at?

Key points to come out of this were that you need qualitative and quantitative data to help measure success – it’s not just about the number of comments, posts, blogs made – it’s also about whether the different stakeholders (end-users, management) are using the platform for team building, transferring knowledge and solving the pain points.

A particular highlight for me and my colleague @darreninteract was being part of the audience for the interactive roundtable about gamification for the workplace with Frederic Williquet (@fredericw).

Surprisingly, only 50% of the audience had heard the term “Gamification” showing how underused this relatively new concept is.

Use the following key elements to drive collaboration via gamification by:

1. Understanding what goals you’re trying to achieve
2. Making it fun and engaging
3. Making it visible – We use Interact Answers which has a leaderboard for everyone to see
4 Giving rewards to recognise peer to peer collaboration and knowledge sharing – we use Interact Rewards to recognise our colleagues help with day-to-day activities.

The final discussion asked a panel of E2.0 experts what their views were on the future roadmap of social business technology.

Highlights were:

• Mobilisation – people need access to information everywhere, all the time.
• Consumerisation – people want to use their own devices to access their organisations social collaboration platform and know instinctively how to use it.
• Analytics – people want to measure success and benchmark against one another

Highlights of Day 2 at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

The opening keynote from Rawn Shah of IBM (@rawn) and Yves Caseau of Bouygues Telecom tackled the challenge of how the use of social tools creates value in the Enterprise. Some interesting key points here included:

• Those who adopt 2.0 fastest need it the least. Companies adverse to 2.0 should start small and practice and share their outcomes.
• Collaboration promotes transparency and honesty. You should cherish mistakes and see them as an opportunity.
• Team collaboration is the future, and the key to solving cross-silo interaction problems.
• To solve complex problems, you don’t just need the managers and the experts, you need the “do-ers”

Luis Suarez of IBM (@elsua) then chaired a panel on Social Maturity Strategies discussing:

• Guidelines – Ensure your workforce understand the tools available to them, and the possibilities they bring.
• Trust – Empower your workforce to feel free to collaborate and challenge processes with new ideas.
• Social – Encourage the use of private social media teams as they create value in an organisation by opening up cross departmental barriers – a great icebreaker!

You can follow mine and Rachel’s thoughts on the conference by following us on twitter @darreninteract and @rachelmccourty and following the hash tag #e20s

Highlights of Day 1 at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

So Simon, tell us about Version 5 and why the new features will help Interact Intranet users

Well, Version 5 is a massive deal for us at Interact because we have spent many months listening to our customers and analysing how we can help them get even more from their intranet.

We have developed some great new features to do this, including the Interact Personal Page which is a page on the intranet tailored to the users needs, Interact Suggests which pushes relevant content to users and the Signpost Widget which makes sure people’s profile pages are kept up to date and ensures users are making full use of all the features in the intranet. All of the new features in Version 5 have been developed around the core offering of Interact Intranet – it’s Intelligence Store which is designed to ensure the right content is pushed to the right people.

We have also made a number of additional enhancements to many of the existing technologies in Interact Intranet, as we do in each software upgrade.

The Interact Personal Page sounds like a great idea, how can it benefit organisations?

The Interact Personal Page is a user centric page on the intranet that is tailored to fit the specific needs of the user.  Similar to how Amazon will recommend items for you based on your previous purchases, the Interact Personal page monitors the users interactions with the intranet and scans their interests, skills and searches to intelligently push them content it thinks they will be interested in. It then presents this content via two clever widgets called Interact Suggests and the Signpost Widget.

One of the main benefits to organisations is that the Personal Page will push users new information they didn’t already know about that could really help people with their daily duties. It also eliminates the constant burden that intranet managers face to design a homepage that will appeal to all staff and removes the need for them to constantly encourage staff to update their profile page.

How does Interact Suggests know what to suggest to users?

Interact Suggests sits on your Personal Page and pushes you tailored information based on what it thinks you might be interested in. It does this by scanning a number of criteria including historical searches and documents you’ve commented on and then suggests information you may be interested in. This means employees can rapidly find what they are looking for on the intranet, saving their time from being wasted searching for content that could be crucial to their job. It also pushes users content they don’t even know exists on the intranet, as people can’t search for information they don’t know is available.

Ensure Interact Intranet is doing the hard work for you! Register for the free webinar – Wow I love Version 5, how can I get the most out of it? >>

How will the Signpost Widget make an intranet managers life easier?

We work with lots of intranet managers and we know that one of the biggest problems for them is out of date information on their intranet. The Signpost widget prompts users to update their profile with information that only they know and can enter. This is critical as there could be somebody in the organisation who needs that skill, for example somebody may need a document translating and they might not be aware that somebody else in the organisation has that language skill.

Intranet managers no longer have to constantly encourage people to use all of the features on their intranet as the Signpost widget points users to the features they don’t know exist on the intranet or they may be nervous of using for the first time. We regularly come across users in organisations who have never used the search function, so the Signpost widget would detect this and promote it to them.

The Signpost widget also provides short tutorials about the features users haven’t used such as the clever linker, @tagging and #tagging. The tutorials give a short overview of how you can use the features to your advantage. All that is topped off with a bit of gamification on the widget! Basically users get an overall score depending on the features they have used and how complete their profile is which is displayed at the top of the Signpost widget, the ultimate goal is to get 100%. This counter widget is continually changing as new features are added and as skills change.

As the Signpost widget performs all these tasks automatically, this frees up time for intranet managers therefore eliminating the pressure of ensuring everyone keeps their profile up to date and makes use of all the features in the intranet. It’s a tool that makes sure everyone in an organisation gets the most out of the intranet and areas that are not seen by everyone don’t get missed.

What are the main benefits of using the new Share feature?

The Share feature is an easy way of pushing around a piece of content to other users without sending an email, so the user is more likely to use. It is a great way for people to start collaborating on the intranet if you are short of time or are nervous about using your intranet. The shared piece of content will automatically appear on your personal profile page and you can choose whether to send an alert notification to your co-workers if you want them to be directly notified of the content you are sharing.

Tell us about the Like feature

The ‘Like’ feature is another simple collaboration tool – it lets you declare that you agree with the message behind the content, basically replacing the need to rate a document. Recent surveys we have carried out have showed us that people don’t like to rate content on the intranet and it is something that rarely happens so ‘Liking’ is a positive approach. It signifies you ‘like’ something and is quick and easy to do.

What was the reason behind developing a new version of the Discussion Forums?

Well, as Discussion Forums are one of the key ways to communicate, share ideas and collaborate we really wanted to improve the usability of them. It was important that we added even more functionality and intelligent features such as the way the forums now scan keywords of the forum and intelligently suggest existing forums that may be similar to the one the user is adding, preventing duplication of content.

Find out the full list of enhancements to the Discussion Forums>>

So what’s next for Interact Intranet?

There will be an exciting new product release at the end of March with lots of new integration features that will help to make intranets be the single point of call in every organisation. We are in a unique position as a leading player in the intranet space and we are dynamic enough to adapt to the changes in social collaboration, so we update our product three times a year to ensure our customer get the maximum potential out of their intranet.

So, what’s new in Interact Intranet Version 5? is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

How do people use intranets?
People go to their intranet for a reason.  These reasons can be broadly split into 3 areas:

A business need (85% of all visits to intranets are for this reason*). This need is dependent on the role of the user and can be anything from a business process to a policy document.  This is a PULL to the intranet where users go in search of a process or document.

To collaborate. If the correct governance is in place and people see the intranet as an outlet for ideas and shared thoughts then they will come to the intranet to post ideas, start discussions and interact with colleagues.

To catch up with company announcements and see what is new. What is clear is that pull information (a business need) brings people to an intranet.  So the push information needs to be relevant to people. The push information that exists on most intranet homepages isn’t relevant to everyone. It tends to be very generic company announcements.

From research that we have done, the intranet becomes more “sticky” if this push information is relevant to the intranet user.  People will have more reason to come back to the intranet if it is relevant.

Content on the web is pushed to you based on your needs

Take a look at successful information sites on the web and they all have some form of intelligence.  They all try to ensure that relevant content is delivered to the correct people.

Google search is probably one of the best ways of demonstrating this.  When you search for something on Google you find information that is relevant to you.  Google searches are based on previous searches and content that you have clicked.  If you search for Thai Restaurants and often click on a favourite restaurant then that restaurant will appear higher in the rankings.

Amazon pushes content based on previous searches and purchases – it knows what you are interested in and then promotes that content. So if you buy a new camera then it may suggest a memory card or flash for that camera.

Some of the most important content on your intranet can get missed

Having a great search on the intranet is perfect if somebody knows what they are looking for.  This pull information is a critical part of any intranet and the navigation and search are crucial in finding this information.

What about the other types of content that exist on the intranet though?  Content that you may not know about such as:

• Departmental announcements
• Shared ideas
• Best practice
• New initiatives
• Product line changes
• Competitive analysis

These are just a few examples of content that gets added into an intranet and can easily get lost.  Few people will go looking for a new idea or product that they didn’t know about. Connecting this content to a user has a dramatic impact on how successful and sticky your intranet will become.  This information needs to get pushed to the correct people.

Connecting relevant content to people is critically important in encouraging collaboration on your intranet.  People are much more likely to comment on content, share ideas and join a discussion if it is relevant to them.  If this relevant content can be pushed to them and doesn’t get lost with irrelevant content then it will be more likely to promote collaboration.

How do intranet managers and intranet champions get the correct information to the correct people?

An intranet homepage is probably one of the most difficult areas of content to design successfully.  This is because an intranet is a very different tool for different people.  As an intranet manager how do you know what the individual needs of everyone in your organisation are?

Traditionally most intranet managers do one of the following 2 things:

1) Try and construct a homepage that has the same content for everyone – this is not likely to succeed.

2) Try and construct multiple homepages based on permissions with some shared content.

This can work but is time consuming and how do you split the people in your company? By geographic location? By job role?  What happens if somebody in the same job role uses the intranet in different ways – searches for information that the other person doesn’t?

An intranet is the perfect place to make content more intelligent.

Most people login to their intranet.  This puts intranets in a very unique position as they know who is looking at them.  They can know a lot more then your geographic location, interest groups or position within the company.

The Future? Each person sees a homepage and content that is relevant to them, based on their interactions with the intranet.

At Interact we have developed an intelligence store that captures information and creates a ‘content vector’ for each person.  This vector defines how they interact with the intranet.

Each person on the intranet builds up a content vector which helps to shape their intranet experience

In Interact Intranet Version 5 we have developed tools that now allow content to find people in an intelligent way – saving intranet managers time and ensuring a more valuable and interactive experience.

* from a recent survey of 100 intranets using Interact Intranet

Why intranets need to be intelligent is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

As we go into the first full week of January we thought we’d list some of our favourite intranet blog posts written by Intranet Managers and Independent Consultants in 2011.

Here is our complete top 12 list, in no particular order:

1. 6 killer reasons for selling social media to executives - By Toby Ward
2. What is the worst idea for an intranet you have ever heard – By Richard Hare
3. Coaching for intranet success – By Stephen Bryne
4. What message does your intranet send to your staff? By James Robertson
5. Design your intranet for the new hires – By Guy van Leemput
6. The intranet: a happiness station – By Bas Zurburg
7. Intranet strategy needs leaders not managers – By Sam Marshall
8. 5 tips for building trust on your intranet – By Jonathan Phillips
9. Four ways Steve Jobs influenced intranets –By Jane McConnell
10. You shape your intranet. Thereafter it shapes you – By Sharon O’Dea
11. Multiple Language Intranets By Martin White
12. How to increase productivity in the digital work place – By Gerry McGovern

What are your favourite blogs of 2011? Share your thoughts below:

Top 12 intranet blogs of 2011 written by Intranet managers and independent consultants is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

A charity intranet has the same fantastic benefits as it does for all organisations, including hugely improving communication, collaboration and business processes, however it also strengthens and maintains the community and culture. Community is essential to ensure volunteers and employees enjoy their workplace, which reduces expensive and time-consuming staff turnover and attrition.

Charities may make great use of staff meetings and management briefings; sharing information in a timely sense is important for all organisations, but is also a challenge. Some top-down or project related communications can miss key workers, or can overlook the rapidly changing needs of front-line staff. An organisation with a mission needs to be able to direct the passion of its people, in line with its values, to create the results the service users require.

Meetings that are supported with online communications and reference materials can be instantly shared with the entire organisation, or a targeted subset. People can then react and share their knowledge and experience – more openly than with email. It’s important to provide opportunities for real participation, whether by simply adding comments on existing information or adding their own blog or discussion forum topic. A charity intranet provides a ‘bottom-up’ communication model which can highlight the frustrations and concerns of service users and the front-line staff – the people who know what’s happening on the ground.

A well-designed, charity specific intranet will reduce administration costs around processes, and the costs involved in communicating changes in legislation and governance. The intranet can be the single source for such reference materials and a platform for connecting people to the organisation and, crucially, to each other.

See more ways a charity intranet can transform processes and improve communications  >>

Wedge Black will talk about the importance of cohesive communications in a charity organisation in a free online webinar which will take place on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM GMT

In this webinar Wedge Black, our resident intranet expert will discuss:

• Why people powered organisations need cohesive communications
• The cost of not providing a platform for work
• Creating change, not just doing business

Attend this event to discover how to:

• Spend less on administration and more on service users
• Empower users, reduce email strain and disseminate essential information

Reserve your place at the webinar today>>

Now you have the chance to WIN a free intranet for your charity worth £25,000 ($40,000) – not only do you get the software platform but also a complete intranet solution including:

• Unlimited user licenses
• Workflow and Forms
• Statistics and Search Analytics
• Blogging Tool and AD sync modules
• A dedicated project manager
• One year’s unlimited support and software update
• Accompanying consultancy sessions with our specialist intranet consultants, training sessions and a bespoke design – tailored for you exclusively by our in-house designers

Find out more and enter today! >>

People powered organisations need cohesive communications is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

Thrive Homes ran a poll to let staff decide on the venue for the Christmas Charity and their Health and Safety office devised a Christmas Quiz to run over the festive period. Their community involvement team used the intranet to advertise for volunteers to help at a local Christmas event using the discussion forum function and then posted photos of the event on the intranet.

Affinity Sutton made great use of their intranet by opening forums asking for idea suggestions for the Christmas party and using polls for options and menu choices. They also used the blog on their intranet to announce updates and news articles to communicate the different office parties and links to who to contact. They use the free text widget and images to do a virtual advent calendar and use the festive widget pack.

Romec are offering employees the chance to use a forum to send online Christmas cards suggesting a donation to a charity for each person ‘@ tagged’ in the message. They also use unwanted Christmas presents as a way of driving the new ‘Buying and Selling’ area on their intranet.

Every year the Chair of Derbyshire County Council raises funds for a chosen charity through a Christmas raffle/auction of prizes donated by local companies. This year they are holding an online auction ‘eBay style’ via a dedicated top menu section. Each ‘lot’ is a separate discussion thread and bids are made by posting replies.

Severn Vale have used the forums for organising their office Secret Santa and other announcements including news articles regarding the customer winter party and office closure times. They are also using the calendars for Christmas celebrations and the staff children’s party and widgets on the homepage to highlight forums and events.

Waterstone’s have made their homepages festive using the gallery widget to put an advent calendar on our homepage – sharing shops’ top tips or favourite books for Christmas, or just a ‘Merry Christmas’ message. They have also set up a Christmas area, which pulls together all Christmas specific information via keywords.

HMV have a Christmas page on their intranet about the Christmas activity that is taking place in store including festive product sections, POS, trading activities and party details. They also have the Christmas edition of their internal magazine on display and festive colleague benefits.

Mosscare created a Christmas feel on their intranet using widgets and a discussion board to advertise the event. They  followed it up with a photo gallery and an article. They also created festive and annual top ten lists to share the type of content staff had been viewing in a fun way!

Interact would like to wish every one a very Merry Christmas!

‘Tis the season to be jolly with your intranet! is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software

Watch the webinar now>>

Questions & answers

Q: If keywords are so important why don’t you make it a compulsory field?

A: Interact Intranet does not make it compulsory as the intelligence store has the capacity to search through content to generate key words automatically. We do still mark these fields in red as author key word allocation is preferable.

Q: So with the keyword tagging – can you click on those links and see who the author is so you can go and explain to them?

A: Interact Intranet statistics module will report on all documents without keywords and it then has direct links to the document concerned so you can find out who the author is and talk to them about the provision of keywords.

Q: Is % of content not been looked at over a period of time important?  What if everyone reads minutes once at the start of the year?  You can’t then delete a year later as they may need to be referred back to?  I would have thought most companies work that way for at least a year regarding performance reports.

A: There will be content which is popular when uploaded and then only referred to infrequently, however this should only account for a small amount of content, if you have large amounts of content which is not being revisited you could look into what searches are regularly being performed and ensure you have the content that is required on a regularly searched for.

Q: How would you recommend you police what your employees are adding?

A: We don’t recommend policing what employees are adding, there are many ways for employees to express their opinions through comments blogs & forums, they will have a lot of questions to ask & information to share, for which there must be mutual respect & trust.

You cannot control spoken rumours, information given in conversation or by e-mail, however on the intranet all of this information is shared & updated openly. If inappropriate content is added then perhaps this is a disciplinary matter not a matter for the intranet & internal communications team. Read ‘Why social collaboration is important for your intranet’, by guest blogger Joshua David for inspiration on this subject.

Q: Hi, a colleague of mine would find this information really useful, but is unable to listen in today, so will the webinar be available to listen to again?

A: Yes we always record our webinars and make them available for viewing; you can access our On-Demand Webinars in the resource centre on the Interact website

Q: Can you benchmark with other intranets in the financial services industry or global technology companies?

A: We can access statistics from any Interact Intranet to carry out our Benchmarking service, find out more about Interact Benchmarking.   

Q: How do companies incentivise people to use the social features e.g. commenting?

A: There are many ways you can get people to engage with your intranet, companies have incentivised with competitions, donations to charity, and using launch strategies. Read Wedge Black’s Blog on engagement or watch The only way to engage intranet users webinar

How successful is your intranet? is a post from: Interact Intranet is Intelligent Intranet Software