Video: How tags work on a social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 29th, 2011 No Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

Because a social intranet makes easy content publishing available to all employees, ensuring people adhere to a complex, pre-defined site taxonomy (like most CMSs use) becomes quite challenging.

Tagging lets employees label content with terms that make sense from their own perspectives. While the “folksonomy” generated may have less strict structure than the usual website taxonomy, it is more flexible and provides useful links between related content.

Tags play an important role in ThoughtFarmer. A simple, yet sophisticated tagging interface makes it easy to add the right tags to any page, including employee profile pages.

Tags are indexed by the search engine and fully integrated in the search page and administrators have a lot of flexibility in setting up and managing tagging through the friendly admin panel.

Watch the video for a demonstration of how tags work on a social intranet:

Tagging features in ThoughtFarmer:

• Tags on every page, including employee profiles
• Multi-word tags with capitalization
• Sophisticated “recommended tags” algorithm
• Matching tags show up as you type
• Click a tag to see all pages & documents with that tag
• Tags fully indexed by the search engine
• Use tags to filter down search results
• Special expertise tags on employee profile pages
• Administrator can create custom tag categories
• Open or controlled tagging vocabulary

ThoughtFarmer administrators (and others who manage social intranets with tagging) see the post on Using Tags to Search in ThoughtFarmer for concrete tips on how to use tags to increase content findability.

Information Management: “ThoughtFarmer Social Intranet Connects with Staff”

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 18th, 2011 No Comments »

Information Management interviewed ThoughtFarmer client Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) about their successful social intranet in a new article “Social Intranet Connects with Staff.” From the article:

By fostering employee use and making certain communications more efficient, management at outdoor gear retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op finds that workers are engaged as never before and using a system that caught on and took off in a way the company never imagined.

MEC is based in Vancouver. The retail co-op started in 1971 selling climbing equipment and has since expanded to all kinds of adventure supplies. It now has more than 1,500 employees in 14 retail locations. In what was first seen as a way to centralize information for employees, MEC adopted a social intranet.

Intranets have traditionally struggled as hotbeds of social activity, so practicality comes first. MEC employees use a platform from ThoughtFarmer called Mondo for checking schedules, requesting time off and reordering items. But once employee needs and behavior were understood, it also became a home to popular forums and interest groups. Mondo, administrators say, was functional out of the box, but more success came with customization for MEC staff.

In the six-month period from October to March 2011, users created 9451 pages, made 7932 comments and attached 3198 documents. MEC is now experiencing average usage levels of 85 percent of employees logging in on a regular basis.

Read the complete article.

Social Intranet Summit Vancouver: Early Bird Rate Ends Friday

Tweet Chris McGrath| August 15th, 2011 No Comments »

What is a social intranet? The definitive explanation.

Tweet Chris McGrath| August 10th, 2011 21 Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

First, what is an intranet?

Definition: An internal website that helps employees get stuff done.

See our full blog post defining “intranet” for a detailed explanation and a fun bit of controversy in the comments.

Next, what is “social”?

“Social” may be the most overused word in technology today. I think you’d find, though, that the average businessperson would struggle to define “social software” and “social media”, resorting to feeble references to Twitter and Facebook.

Social is really just about people interacting with each other. “Social software” is software that enables users to interact with each other. “Social media” is content (“media”) published by a bunch of people who can interact with each other and the content. An “ice cream social” is a party where people interact with each other while eating ice cream. (Given the choice, I’d pick an ice cream social over any other kind of social, any day.)

Definition of “social intranet”

So, to the point of this post. The definitive explanation of a “social intranet”:

An intranet where all employees can author content and connect easily

It takes two things to make an intranet social:

1. Authorship: The ability for everyone to create content
2. Connections: The ability to see the people behind the content and to connect with them in some meaningful way

Traditional intranets have very narrow authorship, restricted to a small handful with official “editor” permission. Traditional intranets also lack connections. Content is basically anonymous and shows no social context, no connection between pages and specific people.

A social intranet allows all employees to author rich content, connects every piece of content to a specific, living and breathing person, and helps people connect with each other. On a social intranet the “people layer” permeates the entire site and makes every page more personal and more human.

Origin of the term “social intranet”

I’m proud to say that I coined the term “social intranet” back in early 2009. Well, it might have been Darren (our CEO). Or maybe we both cried out the term in unison during a moment of epiphany in a meeting. We can’t quite remember which one of us it was, except that we both erupted in enthusiasm when we realized we had captured the term that explained what ThoughtFarmer was (and is). I suppose we should have recorded the event and ran to the trademark office. In any event, we’re pleased the term has taken off.

Not about specific tech tools

We’ve seen some interesting definitions of “social intranet”, some that are too complex and others that define the term based on the specific software tools that have thus far been popular on social intranets (such as blogs, wikis, activity streams, etc.).

Those definitions can be helpful, but limit themselves with reliance on specific technology and formats. Just because you don’t have a blog on your intranet doesn’t mean it’s not social. And the specific tools available next year may not be on this year’s list.

Who knows what new enterprise technology will be common on the intranet of the future? We’re not sure. But we’re pretty sure wide authorship and the formation of connections will be at the core. What really matters is that social intranets humanize the workplace and give every employee a face and a voice.

Case study: Crowdsourcing the name for a new social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 8th, 2011 2 Comments »

Ephraim Freed used to be the intranet manager at Oxfam America. Today he guest blogs for ThoughtFarmer and helps clients effectively prepare and launch their ThoughtFarmer intranets. This story is about how Oxfam America named its intranet.

At Oxfam America, we wanted employees to feel a sense of ownership over the new social intranet, so we had them choose the name themselves. We crowdsourced the name in a structured way that involved employees from around the globe and gave every employee a voice and a vote.

Business need: Unite a globally dispersed staff

At Oxfam America in 2008 we were using a vanilla implementation of SharePoint 2003 (SPPS anyone?) for our intranet and needed much more. The site’s information architecture represented many intranet worst practices and the search engine had been disabled due to security issues in SharePoint 2003. Text dominated the homepage and other parts of the site, most of which were used for simple document libraries only. People continually complained about how unfriendly the site was for even basic tasks and we had no training material.

In addition to technical and content issues we struggled to feel a sense of kinship across geographic distances. Like many global organizations, each office felt a little like its own separate company. For an innovative global nonprofit that sought to empower people living in poverty around the world, this somewhat disempowering intranet just felt wrong.

So we decided to build a new intranet that could unite employees from around the world and help the organization build a new sense of shared purpose and connection. From day one the CEO wanted the new intranet to be “alive, vibrant, and active.”

At the time I was the Intranet Project Lead and realized that in order to reach the CEO’s goal we would need to engage employees in the project in every way possible. Choosing the name for the new intranet provided a ripe opportunity for this.

Structured crowdsourcing process with 5 steps

Before we started the voting process I had come up with a clever name I liked. But I knew this couldn’t be my intranet – it had to be our intranet. So we laid out a clear process for selecting a new intranet name and moved it forward using our old intranet.

STEP 1 – Offered a simple prize (and recognition)

We offered neither money nor time off to the winner of the competition. Instead we offered public recognition within the company and a t-shirt from my favorite boutique clothier, Johnny Cupcakes. So the prize was basically just recognition. This avoided any concerns about favoritism or inequity, but was enough to motivate employees to participate.

STEP 2 – Collected name suggestions

We created a section on the old intranet where employees could post name suggestions. We set a deadline to suggest names and then communicated the hell out of it. All name suggestions were visible to all employees and we set no limit on the number of names an employee could suggest. After a two week period we ended the name suggestion phase with great results. Employees from almost every office had submitted suggestions and even the Senior Vice President threw his hat in the ring.

STEP 3 – Reviewed submissions

While the overall process was very open, we didn’t include every suggested name in the voting phase. Instead, a small committee reviewed all the suggested names and removed from the list any that seemed inappropriate or silly. For example, while the suggestion of “Unicorn Kisses” brought out the LOLs, we didn’t consider it a serious option.

STEP 4 – Voting on a scale

We sent a survey out to all employees with the narrowed down list of names. Instead of offering simply “yes” or “no” voting, we created a scale on which people could rate each suggested name. This offered the opportunity to identify the most popular names, but also exposed the most polarizing suggestions.

The voting scale included:

• Love it
• Like it
• Neutral
• Don’t like it
• Please no!

We left the voting open for two weeks and communicated plentifully with employees to encourage high turn-out.

STEP 5 – Analysis and selection

Because we used a rating scale rather than simple yes/no voting, the final name selection required some analysis. For example, the name I suggested, “VIRGO” (VIRtual Global Office), received the highest number of “Love it” votes, but also received a lot of votes for “Don’t like it” and “Please no!”

Conversely, the suggested name “Padare,” which means “community space” in the Zimbabwean language of Shona, won a few less votes for “Love it” but got more votes for “Like it” and received very few negative votes.

So we chose “Padare” as the winner because it had the greatest overall positive response. We announced the name along with a definition of the word “Padare” and I had the privilege of buying the Johnny Cupcakes t-shirt for the winner myself. The winner chose a Boston Celtics themed design which I happily hand-delivered when he next visited the Boston office.

Setting the tone for the new intranet

While it could have gone differently, the winning name came from an employee outside of headquarters – someone from our Southern Africa office. This simple fact set a stake in the ground to guide the rest of the project and symbolized the empowerment the new social intranet would provide to employee voices.

I remember two years after the official launch of the intranet hearing from employees that they felt a sense of ownership over Padare, which is something we rarely get to say about enterprise software applications.

It can be surprising how small things like this influence the feel and trajectory of a project. The naming process required no additional money or resources and provided an opportunity to get employees excited about the new intranet. Generally when we see that one of our colleagues has a voice within the company, it increases the sense of voice and involvement for the rest of us.

However, this process may not be right for every company. I recently spoke to a company that asked employees for suggested names for the new intranet, but didn’t get any that worked well. The process I’ve outlined worked at Oxfam America, but each company must find a process that fits its own culture and goals.

Epilogue: What’s Bourbon got to do with it?

As an aside, I want to mention a high point that came after the name was selected. Before the naming process finished I made a bet with a buddy of mine in the office. He told me that “no matter what the name is, people will call it ‘the intranet.’”

I firmly believed in the importance of branding the new social intranet and investing in it a personality and meaning beyond its simple features. So I bet my buddy a bottle of good Bourbon that within three months people would routinely call the new intranet by its chosen name, whatever it would be.

Throughout the entire launch process we referred to the intranet as “Padare” and even used active language such as “Padare lets any employee post to the news section,” which made Padare into an actor rather than just a place or application.

Sure enough, at an all-staff meeting three months after the official launch of the new intranet the President, COO, and HR Department each referred to “Padare,” never once mentioning “the intranet.” True to his word my friend conceded the win to me and brought in a bottle of Knob Creek.

The branding campaign was so successful, in fact, that up until the day I left Oxfam America colleagues referred to me as “Papa Padare” and “Padre Padare” on a daily basis. I even saw nicknames for Padare itself. The day I noticed someone had a browser shortcut to “Padare” titled “Pad Thai” I felt a sense of accomplishment. The new intranet had such a character of its own that colleagues even gave it their own personal nicknames.

For inspiration around intranet names, see the previous ThoughtFarmer post What to name your intranet?

Real intranet managers: Luke Mepham is “Mr. Intranet”

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 2nd, 2011 13 Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

This is one in a series of posts from our Real Intranet Manager Interviews where we highlight the creative and thoughtful people behind successful intranets of all types. Read more about the series, or see previous posts on Emily Staresina of Stockland Property Group, Tanis Roadhouse of MD Physician Services/CMA, Christy Season of SCANA, William Amurgis of AEP and Dinesh Tantri from ThoughtWorks.

Luke at a glance

Luke Mepham, Global Intranet Strategy & User Experience Manager at Aviva PLC

• Name: Luke Mepham
• On Twitter: @LukeMepham
• Age: 33
• Hometown: Born in Yorkshire; grew up in Norwich
• Job title: Global Intranet Strategy & User Experience Manager (GISUEM for short)
• Company: Aviva PLC (Insurance)
• Employees: 45,000
• Headquarters: London, England
• Name of intranet: Aviva World
• Last intranet overhaul: April 2010
• Technology stack: SharePoint 2010

Humble beginnings in the Help Desk

“Hello there, Mr. Intranet.”

People actually call Luke Mepham “Mr. Intranet.” It may have something to do with his decade or more of working on intranets at the same company. Luke got into intranets without much pomp and circumstance. “Back in 1999 while working on the IT Helpdesk I took on responsibility for putting self-service content up on the company’s first, very primitive intranet,” he told me.

Luke has always been the kind of guy people come to for help with technical things, from printer settings to Excel spreadsheets. He’s friendly, tech savvy, and loves to fix things. So it made perfect sense for him to start working on the help desk content for the intranet. Little did his colleagues know the love affair that basic task would ignite.

It’s one of the great mysteries of the universe, why some of us find intranets fascinating and become drawn in by the gravitational pull of employee communications, user centered design, collecting requirements, getting the most out of web technology, and making work a better place to be. But mystery aside, Luke is definitely one of us passionate intranet nerds.

Career trajectory pushed off course

After his humble beginnings on the help desk, Luke became part of the intranet team. Over the years the team transformed, grew, shrank, switched departments, outsourced technical development, and went through many changes, but all along Luke was there, working on the intranet.

At a certain point, though, Luke’s supervisors started shifting him slowly away from the intranet and towards supply chain management and application development. He managed software development projects and a team of Indian developers, but didn’t feel the same sense of fulfillment he’d felt working on intranets. Luke said that “while grateful for the broader experience I was able to gain, I felt I’d strayed away from what I really enjoyed and was good at.” As he came to realize this, his thoughts and heart returned to the intranet world.

In 2007 as Aviva started consolidating its acquired and merged companies into a single global brand, an opportunity came up to manage the UK intranet team. Luke applied for and won the job and happily returned to the intranet realm.

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

A series of fortunate intranet events

As part of the company’s push towards globalization, the group CEO called for a new single intranet, available to employees everywhere in the organization. This gave Luke the chance to work on a new intranet for a 45,000-person employee base and he took on the project with a fresh gusto. The first phase was simply to create a global intranet that reflected a consistent brand. This happened in 2008 with the launch of “Aviva World.” In 2009, once employees had become familiar with the new global intranet, Luke led a huge project to build out the functional content - the type of stuff that falls under “Work & Office” and “HR & Career” headings in the global navigation - for what they discovered would be a total of 6,000 operational tasks.

Originally the Aviva World intranet team had a clear picture of what they wanted from this functional content and how to organize it. “I had a little trouble getting folks on the team to buy in to a user centered design approach, so I ran a card sorting exercise in the London office. The results came back and showed that users had very different ideas about how to organize content than the intranet team.” The simple card sorting exercise convinced the team to follow Luke’s lead and employ some key practices of user-centric intranet design.

Over the following three months Luke’s team conducted card sorting exercises in offices around the globe and online, involving a total of 1,200 employees. Through many iterations of card sorting and with help from a consultant and software to analyze the results, Luke’s team came up with a new and beautiful information architecture for the functional content. The new IA went five levels deep, but represented hundreds of perspectives and many hours of gathering and analyzing data.

Once the section was completed, the functional content area saw a 96% success rate for task completion and an 80% accuracy rate. That means that four out of five employees could find the right content for a task on the very first try. These rates are what every intranet manager strives for; Luke’s team was able to achieve these results through their significant efforts and investment in card sorting, analysis, and testing.

It was this work that landed Luke the Global User Experience role in London.

Open, transparent, & engaging intranet planning

Luke credits the success of the content project to broad employee engagement and input. This represents one of Luke’s wonderful traits, and a trait shared by many successful intranet managers: he loves ideas and doesn’t have to come up with all the good ones himself. This perspective took center stage the following year (2010) when Luke and his team started planning for an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

“While many intranet upgrades are seen as an opportunity to surprise employees with a cool new treat, we wanted to lead a very open process. I got approval to seek extensive employee contributions to the upgrade planning process and to run a very transparent project.”

Luke and his team created forums on the intranet and asked employees for input on intranet design improvements. Employee comments poured in and the intranet team used the feedback to plan for the upgrade. This high level of openness and employee involvement led to an intranet upgrade that avoided catching people by surprise and instead received rave reviews.

Luke wears sunglasses at night

Today, the latest company discussion forum posts show up on the homepage of the upgraded Aviva intranet, which gets 10 million pageviews per month and has 35,000 discussions in forums. Discussion topics range greatly, from employees helping other employees in need to gathering important corporate insights. Luke elaborates:

“Recently an employee had his iPod stolen. Through forum posts on the intranet, employees around the world organized and raised enough money to buy him a new iPod.”

“When Aviva employees are invited to speak to the UK government, they gather other employees’ questions and comments beforehand via discussion forums on the intranet.”

Employees are actively using and benefiting from the intranet and Luke had a critical role to play in that success. Today he is setting his sites on the new horizons of a fully enabled mobile intranet. But it’s not exactly Luke’s inspiring vision that has made him a great intranet manager. Instead it’s his focus on employees and his role as a facilitator. “The intranet is really about what it allows people to do. I get turned on by ideas much more than the kudos of having good ideas myself,” Luke told me.

It’s that ability to see and hear his colleagues, truly value them, and find ways to support their needs that has made Luke a wonderful intranet manager. While his career moved away from intranets for a bit, Luke’s passion for helping colleagues do their work brought him back to the intranet world and today he’s living the dream.

81 Intranet Governance Questions to Ask Yourself

Tweet Gordon Ross| July 25th, 2011 5 Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

Intranet governance, especially social intranet governance, is tough. We believe intranet governance matters and that it is a crucial factor in the success or failure of an intranet implementation.

We help our ThoughtFarmer clients in their intranet roll-outs by doing a review of some basic governance topics, providing links to some great resources from folks like Martin White, James Robertson, Maish Nichani, and Toby Ward, and by asking a lot of questions. I’ve compiled some of the big questions that we find lead to important discussions when it comes to intranet governance and management. While long, it’s by no means an exhaustive list — as always, we appreciate hearing what questions you’ve found helpful in making your own intranet decision-making process that much better.

PROJECT VS PROGRAM

• Are you running an intranet project (new intranet, redesign of an intranet, re-launch) or a program (ongoing intranet operations, day to day initiatives)?
• Does your organization govern projects and programs differently?
• Have you thought about the difference between the two?
• If you’re running an intranet project, have you thought about how you will make the transition to program/operations once your project is complete?

SPONSORSHIP/LEADERSHIP

• Who is your project/program sponsor(s)? Are they able to approve funding and resources?
• Is your project/program sponsor an individual or a group of individuals?
• Is your project/program sponsor, “the end of the line” or do you have a decision maker(s) that they report to?
• Who is the most senior-level person responsible for advocating for the usage of the intranet? What degree of influence and authority does this person have? Do you feel it’s enough, given your intranet strategy?

GOVERNANCE

• Who establishes and maintains the governance structure?
• Who grants authority for governance?
• Does your organization have a larger entity that governs projects, portfolios, programs? Are you a part of that structure? How do you fit into their governance structure?

INTRANET STRATEGY

• Do you have an intranet strategy?
• Have you consulted others in the creation of the intranet strategy?
• Is your intranet strategy signed off?
• Do you know how to get your intranet strategy signed-off?
• Have you informed others about the contents of the intranet strategy?
• Do others (from Executive to front-line staff) understand how the intranet strategy will impact them?
• Who is responsible for making changes to the intranet strategy?
• How often do you get an opportunity to review your intranet strategy and ensure that it’s still effective and relevant?
• How are you helping others make day-to-day decisions around content and communications on the intranet that align with the strategy?
• Who is evaluating whether or not the intranet strategy is a success? How often does that happen? What kind of assurance mechanisms do you have included in your intranet strategy?

DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS

• Who is responsible for resolving conflicts, issues, and risks that occur around the intranet and its operations?
• Who keeps track of the progress made on the intranet?
• What’s the process for prioritizing intranet initiatives? Who decides on what’s next in the queue?
• Who is responsible for communicating the intranet’s success to the governance structure and the rest of the organization? How often does that happen?

STANDARDS/POLICIES

• How is content decided upon? Do you have a set of intranet policies, procedures, and standards?
• What other organizational polices, procedures, and standards do you need to take into account for your intranet? Privacy? Security? IT? Brand/identity standards? Legal?
• How have you integrated the other policies with your intranet policy?

CONTENT

• Who is responsible for the information architecture and content strategy of your intranet?
• Who is able to author, edit, and publish content?
• Who is able to leave comments?
• Who is able to blog?
• Who is able to create different content types (calendars, blogs, surveys, discussion forums)?
• Who is able to remove, archive, or delete content from the intranet?
• How is the content strategy communicated to staff, so they understand what type of content to create?
• How are content standards upheld? Who is responsible for quality control of content on the intranet?

COMMUNICATIONS

• Who is responsible for designing the communication strategy for your intranet?
• What different delivery channels within your intranet are being used for formal news-type content?
• Who are the different audiences that communications needs to reach within your organization? How are they different? What are their information and attention constraints?

COLLABORATION

• Does your organization have an explicit collaboration strategy? If yes, who is the owner of that strategy? What is your relationship with that owner? Are they a part of your governance structure?
• How does the intranet play a part in the collaboration strategy? If there are gaps, how could the intranet play a part in that strategy? What are the opportunities?
• Who is responsible for supporting teams and projects as they use the intranet to collaborate?
• Do you have pre-defined intranet spaces or collections of project templates and artifacts to assist teams in collaborating on the intranet?
• Does your intranet have a space where employees can share their “collaboration lessons learned” to help improve overall organizational collaboration practices?

IT ENVIRONMENT

• Where is your intranet hosted? Do you know who is responsible for its operations?
• What happens when there is an outage to your intranet?
• How do you deal with planned outages, upgrades, and scheduled maintenance?
• Who is responsible for the implementation of user accounts and security models within the rest of the organization?
• Does your intranet rely on a single user directory?
• Are you consulted about changes to that user directory and security model?
• What line-of-business applications (HR, financial, CRM, etc.) does your intranet need to integrate with?
• Do you know the business and technical owners of your organization’s line of business applications?
• Are you consulted or informed around decision-making for line of business applications?
• Do you share a common IT environment with internal applications?
• Do you share a common user interface design standard for internal web-based applications?

MEASUREMENT

• Who is responsible for determining key performance indicators and measuring the success of the intranet?
• Who communicates the success throughout the different organizational groups?
• If your intranet is not meeting its goals, what is your decision making process around strategy, improvements, and changes?

Have any other favourite governance questions? Leave them in the comments below.

Demo video: Expertise locator fully integrated in a social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| July 19th, 2011 No Comments »

A searchable people directory is the most common “killer app” on an intranet and this feature kicks butt in ThoughtFarmer, social intranet software. The people directory includes faceted search that lets you narrow down results and the search engine indexes expertise tags on the built-in rich user profiles. Expertise location is easy and fully integrated with the rest of the social intranet. Watch the video to see these features in action.

Key features of expertise locator

• Fully integrated with: Intranet search, employee profiles, activity streams, tagging, group page membership
• Add custom expertise fields for all employee profiles
• Expertise tags indexed by search engine
• Click expertise tag on a profile to see others with the same tag
• Combine expertise tags with other search facets to narrow results

Built-in people search facets

The people directory automatically applies search facets based on employees’ membership in different group pages. If someone is a member of the Pittsburgh office page, she can be found using that location filter.

• Last name
• Location
• Department
• Team, Project & other group types

Default expertise fields

• Languages spoken
• Technical skills
• Certifications

5 ideas for custom fields to add

ThoughtFarmer allows administrators to easily add custom expertise fields. Here are five suggestions that can help companies bend the expertise locator to their specific needs:

• Past projects
• Clients worked with
• Software skills
• Cities lived in
• Past job titles

Webinar: Information Architecture 101 – Task Testing

Tweet Chris McGrath| July 18th, 2011 1 Comment »

On Wednesday, July 20th, at 10am Pacific, join ThoughtFarmer and Senior User Experience Designer
 Selma Zafar for a webinar full of concrete tips for intranet managers: Information Architecture 101: Task Testing.

Task testing is one of the most useful exercises for refining the navigation structure of your intranet. It results in site navigation that users readily understand and it can be executed with a few simple materials.
 This 60-minute session builds on last months’ session on card sorting and will be presented by Human Factors professional and instructor Selma Zafar.

Register now (use discount code I-SAW-THE-BLOG)

This webinar is based on last year’s Social Intranet Summit. The Social Intranet Summit 2011 is September 28th, 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. Early bird rate available now!

Demo video: Calendars are friendly & collaborative in ThoughtFarmer 4.5

Tweet Chris McGrath| July 14th, 2011 No Comments »

Along with a host of other enhancements and new features in version 4.5, we gave calendars an extreme makeover. Now you can add events with a single click, drag-and-drop events to change the date or time, color code different types of events, switch between month, week and day views, and see an improved display of multi-day events. Watch the demo video to see these new features in action.

Calendar features

• Create new events with one click
• Simple drag-and drop to change date & time
• Tab between months
• View by month, week or day
• “Today” button
• Color coding for different event types

Plus standard features of all ThoughtFarmer pages:

• Start discussions on any page
• Attach files to event pages
• Edit content of event pages
• Collaborative editing with colleagues
• Add tags on event pages
• Page owner listed for each event page
• Revision history on every page
• Security settings are granular & easy to change

Related: Sign up for our free webinar on July 20th, 2011, “Information Architecture 101: Task Testing“. Use discount code I-SAW-THE-BLOG.