The discussion about whether IT or communication should own the intranet has been ranging on for as long as anyone can remember. If you want your intranet to be truly successful, you will need to look beyond the two usual departments to increase the value of your intranet.

With very few exceptions, the use of most intranets follows The Long Tail concept illustrated below. The Top 20 % represent the most visited pages, most read content or most used applications on your intranet.

In the top 20% you’ll typically find the most used pages and applications such as the phone book, org. chart, vacation scheduling and news. The long tail include lesser used, but still very important content such as specific process definitions, documents, and several critical business applications used by a limited number of specific users.

In most organisations, both IT and communications are increasingly unable to handle the top 20% as they are both understaffed and lack a proper mandate. Both are certainly understaffed and often under-trained and are thus unable to manage the long tail.

In May European intranet expert Jane McConnell wrote a comment on intranet ownership “mental models” where she described different models for intranet ownership, with IT and communication playing lead roles.

In organisations where the intranet is no longer a hobby, I suspect that the Finance and HR departments will begin to play an increasingly important role. Finance will become involved sooner or later if it concerns anything that is business critical and HR will take increasing notice when the intranet becomes a significant factor in whether the organisation is a great place to work.

Some organisations in our community of practice have designated HR as the formal owner of collaboration, e.g. project rooms, wikis and instant messaging. To them collaboration is increasingly becoming an integral part of their intranets. IT typically acts as system owner, e.g. for SharePoint, while communication sometimes, but not always, owns the news section of the intranet.

Have you managed to move beyond IT and communications? If so, what triggered the change?

The municipality of Aalborg; Denmark’s third largest city, recently relaunched their website using SharePoint 2007. They chose the unusual route of running the project in-house with minimal involvement from third party system integrators. I talked to the responsible project manager, Niels Højdahl Pedersen, about the lessons learned.

Accessibility for SharePoint 2007 will cost you
Q: Did the relaunch of the website on 18 June go according to the original plan?

A: “In the short term, yes, but in the longer term the project was delayed significantly, because of an ongoing expansion of the project scope.

The project started about 18 months ago with the ambition of revitalising the website by optimizing content and structure. We soon realised, that it needed a significant amount of work, so we decided that a new information architecture and design were needed. Unfortunately, our former platform; Microsoft CMS 2002, was not meeting our requirements and Microsoft furthermore proclaimed that their support would expire in April 2009. So we decided to upgrade to SharePoint 2007 with a plan to use it for our intranet as well later on.

When we asked system integrators for prices, they nearly doubled their quotes when we mentioned accessibility and standards compliance, which is legally required by public organisations in Denmark. So we decided to mostly do the project internally with our IT department, who had .NET experience but had never worked with SharePoint 2007. It was a major challenge to get the technical organisation up and running. We also soon learned that development and adjustments in SharePoint requires huge effort.

Throughout the process we kept a third party system integrator on the sideline for when our own people got stuck. They also did a quality review of the technical setup, which they actually complimented – particularly the speed with which the process had been completed.”

Educate your users well
Q: Has it been necessary to make organisational changes during the project?

A: “First of all we have adjusted the number of content contributors from 200 to 60 [not a bad idea according to Janus Boye: Few web editors is better for your website]. These have been trained to write better for the web. Still, strange things happened when we opened up the system to them. We have also set up an informal network of about 10 people, who track changes and guide the editors. Another thing we are working on is an integration of Compliance Sheriff from HiSoftware to the editorial workflow to ensure that the editors comply with the rules we set up.

In the future we might want to get a more tight governance structure in place if we are to stick to our ambitions when it comes to quality and accessibility. This could also help us realise our digital strategy of making the website the preferred entrance point to the public sector for citizens and organisations in our municipality.”

Don’t underestimate the technical challenges
Q: What is your best advice to others using SharePoint 2007 for a public website?

A: “Do not underestimate technical maintenance of the platform. SharePoint is a cumbersome and complicated platform to work with and things take time – especially if you want to focus on accessibility and compliance.

You also need to educate your users well, because most things are not particularly obvious in MOSS. And even if you educate you users well you have to set up strict technical limitations to prevent undermining the accessibility rules.”

Caveats when choosing a system integrator
I would stress, that even if you want to run your SharePoint project by yourself like Aalborg Kommune, you should still find an experienced system integrator. When choosing a partner, there are several caveats you’ll need to be aware of. My colleague Janus Boye has also recently shared a list of overlooked SharePoint success factors, which you might want to take into account. Another good resource is our report Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites, which gathers experiences from early adopters and provides decision support for business users in all project phases.

Our best advice is as always to talk to other users of the system and learn from their experiences. Do this by joining our community of practice, where we have several groups focusing on SharePoint. Aalborg Kommune is a member and they report that they benefitted greatly from talking to and visiting other users of SharePoint. At our annual conference in November we have a dedicated Microsoft-track, where SharePoint is certain to be a hot topic.

During the research for our report, Best Practices for Creating a Web Strategy, I had the chance to talk to several practitioners, including many from our community of practice, about their web strategy experiences, and learn about the critical factors for success.

Two key recommendations from practitioners were:

1. Speak the language of your organisation
2. Make problems and benefits tangible

First, in terms of speaking the language of your organisation, you could start by asking yourself:

• Do I have a clear picture of which strategies already exist in the organisation?
• What are the organisational values?
• How is success measured in my organisation?

Considering these factors first will give your web strategy a greater chance of succeeding. Also, keep in mind that some organisations are driven by numerical analysis and finance. Others are driven by stories about users who complain. Likewise, keep the web strategy in a format that works in your organisation. This might be a short document; it might be a presentation. Do keep it short, though, as you will need to communicate it outside your web team.

Secondly, you need to make problems tangible, so they can be understood by executives who generally have little understanding of the web. Top management is often where the strategy has to be signed off, and if you are asking for more resources you will certainly need to show what difference you will create for the organisation. Often, web managers will focus too much on low level problems and technical details that are irrelevant to others.

Some examples of translating web problems into business problems could be:

• Demonstrate how the organisation is losing money with the current web organisation
• Short videos of usability test showing customers leaving your site
• Simple visual diagrams of how the website connects sales people with customers
• Benchmarking against competitors

What are your tips for making web activities understandable and tangible for the rest of the organisation?

Last week I chaired a discussion on “Working with integrators” at our annual practitioners-only SharePoint Day. The topic is relevant for other systems as well, but we quickly agreed that finding the right system integrator is an overlooked SharePoint success factor. Everybody around the table acknowledged that system integrator costs usually take most of the budget (a well-known phenomenon known as SITATM).

The delegates at the table each worked with very different types of system integrators and had very mixed outcomes. One had been very impressed until the contract was signed. After that, several team members from the system integrator were substituted for less experienced colleagues. This was quite disappointing and the project experienced delays and cost overruns. You may want to ensure that your contract somehow restricts how the system integrator can change their team. In return, any experienced system integrator would ask for reciprocation, meaning that they also have valid concerns when you change your team. You may not like it, but this would actually be quite fair.

One of the delegates had a good experience with a small boutique consultancy with less than 10 employees. Coincidentally, that same delegate was also quite experienced with SharePoint, which always plays an important role in the equation.

Another delegate had opted for a larger agency that offered much more than SharePoint integration. This delegate was far from impressed and felt that the integrator in particular was missing experience from related projects, at least when they started around 18 months ago. If the agency can produce no SharePoint references on the same version as they are offering you, you risk being exposed to first-mover disadvantage. If you want to avoid paying for training the integrator, you should make references from related projects an important evaluation criterion, when you identify the right system integrator.

In our discussion we also covered the question of when you should consider divorcing your system integrator. One customer had recently revoked their marriage with a system integrator and it was an expensive and unpleasant exercise. To get started with a new agency, they initially opted for a only a small scoping exercise with the integrator after which they had a go/no-go option. This is usually a good approach as it manages some of the risk involved in a web project and also encourages dialogue and understanding on both sides of the table.

Only one participant in the discussion had a direct relationship with Microsoft, which is something I have highlighted the benefits of for a long time. This can help you stay informed about roadmap, documentation, best practices, and other intangibles. In the big picture SharePoint is still pocket change to Microsoft, but several of our community of practice members have called Microsoft helpful and attentive to requests. Under a non-disclosure agreement, Microsoft has also been known to share several roadmap details, which is a positive move.

Finally, we covered geography. “Have them close by” as a participant said. Since SharePoint is more a framework than an out-of-the-box product, you will benefit immensely from face-to-face time with your system integrator. Dialogue is required to make a SharePoint project fly.

In short: If you don’t build your own SharePoint skills and challenge the integrator to do better, SharePoint will remain their goldmine. Have you got any learnt lessons you can share?

Today it is still common to find commercial web systems that only support Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). With Firefox usage share at 22%, the days are over when you as a customer should silently accept this. Do you really want to limit the user experience and functionality for 22% of all users?

The second browser war in history is ongoing. Microsoft won the first one back in the late 90’s, but this time things are not looking so good for IE. According to updated browser usage share numbers (source: NetApplications), Internet Explorer is today only used by 65% down from 91% in Q4 2004. In the same period, Firefox market share has risen from 3% to 22%. This means that Firefox usage has extended its reach far beyond the ranks of IT and developers. Other significant browser are Safari (8% usage) and Chrome (2% usage).

I suspect that Firefox usage share is even higher in higher education due to their very heterogeneous IT environments. In general, public sector organisations probably have higher Firefox adoption due to their tendencies towards accessibility, standards and open source. In the private sector you may have a more controlled and homogenous IT environment, but still your customers and employees may use home computers, with Firefox or even Mozilla as their preferred browser.

Among the many vendors that we regularly cover on this blog, here’s some that still only offer limited support for Firefox:

• Alterian Immediacy
• Composite
• CrownPeak
• Dynamicweb
• EMC Documentum
• EPiServer
• GOSS
• IBM
• Microsoft SharePoint
• Open Text RedDot
• Oracle Stellent
• SDL Tridion
• Sitecore
• Webtrends

In some cases basic functionality is available in Firefox, but more advanced functionality only in Internet Explorer and sometimes even only on Windows (c.f. see details on SharePoint browser support). Feel free to drop a comment below, if you have any vendors that should be added or removed from the above list.

As a customer you should make vendors demonstrate compatibility. If there are any limitations at all with regards to Firefox, make sure that these are publicly documented together with a stated commitment towards moving to complete support in the very near future.

To back up your requirements, I encourage you to take a closer look at browser usage share in your analytics tool for your own site. It might be significantly higher than the global market share. On this site 40% of all visitors in May 2009 used Firefox.

Have you been asleep when it comes to Firefox support?

Today European open source portal vendor eXo announced that their main product, eXo Portal will be merged into the JBoss community. A new release of JBoss Portal, based on the joint code base will be available towards the end of 2009.

Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo Platform (the French company behind eXo Portal) makes an interesting point on some of the open source challenges in the press release:

What has always been a challenge for any portal community or vendor is providing the right balance of robust infrastructure and engaging usability features. This collaborative project will strive to strike that balance and will work to create an enterprise-grade, open source alternative to expensive, bloated closed source portals.

Here’s my take on the news; as always from the customer’s perspective:

• Future releases will enjoy the benefit of a significantly larger engineering team. In late 2008, eXo already claimed to be the project with the most active contributors.
• There will still be two JBoss Portal products, a community and commercial edition. eXo will no longer have a separate enterprise portal product. Instead the new common code will be used as the platform for eXo Platform, a wider eXo offering which mainly targets Microsoft SharePoint.
• It should bring about some consolidation (finally), at least in the open source space, where eXo will now be increasingly focused on being an open source SharePoint alternative, while JBoss will focus on the enterprise market (e.g. competing with IBM and Oracle). Besides JBoss, Liferay and uPortal are now the only other significant open source projects in the portal space
• Existing JBoss Portal or eXo Portal customers should expect to have to do some exporting, importing and potentially other non-trivial exercises to move to the new and improved release. Remember to plan and budget for this. I recently commented that JBoss Portal seemed lost at JBoss/Red Hat. This news might give it some much needed attention.
• Prospective customers should take a careful look at their plans to decide which product to start with. Do you want an existing but old product and then be faced with the aforementioned upgrade or would you rather risk potential first-mover disadvantages by waiting for the new release?
• On a broader level this continues the high-level of activity in the open source community here in 2009. On this blog we’ve recently featured the demise of HyperContent, the growth of Umbraco, discussed Drupal for publishers, and asked about the future of Typo3.

Ideally, the new open source project, dubbed JBoss eXo Portal, will combine some of the eXo Portal strengths, in particular standards compliance and multi-language support, with the integration to the JBoss family of products. It is still very early days and until you have downloaded a version of the new releases and tested it thoroughly, I would not make too many plans based purely on marketing and roadmap details.

For detailed and updated evaluations of eXo Portal and JBoss Portal, please refer to the Enterprise Portal Report published by CMS Watch.

The open source community is currently driving in the passing lane on the Autobahn, but the popular open source content management system Typo3 has slowed down. The recent major release, version 4, dates back to April 2006, the Danish project founder Kasper Skårhøj has virtually left the project and the most recent news on typo3.com dates back to October 2008. What’s going on?

It might simply be a sign of adolescence that Typo3 is as slow moving as Microsoft in the Web CMS space. Still, compared to other open source projects, e.g Drupal or Umbraco, the rate of innovation at Typo3 is far from impressive. Version 5, the next major release, has been under development for several years. Initially, the plans were to boldly drop backwards-compatibility, but since then the plans have been changed. In October 2008 a so-called Berlin Manifesto was released, which clarified the future of v4 and v5. In the Manifesto, the Typo3 Core Team promised a few things, most notably:

• Version 4 development will continue after the the release of version 5
• Migration of content from version 4 to version 5 will be easily possible
• Version 5 will introduce many new concepts and ideas.

While version 5 has been in the works, Kasper Skårhøj, the original initiator of Typo3 back in 1997, has slowly been transitioning out of the project. Kasper was at cmf2005 when the Typo3 Association was still newly founded, but since then the Danish “King of Typo3″ has abdicated. Typo3 has been most successful in Germany and today the version 5 development team is exclusively German. If the community is indeed sustainable, Kasper’s departure should be healthy news, but in comparison, both Plone and Umbraco still benefit from very active founders.

As I recently wrote in the obituary for HyperContent, a dying open source CMS, it is never good for a community when nothing happens. While typo3.com shows little news, you can find more announcements on the developer pages on typo3.org and you’ll find even more activity if you follow the Typo3 mailing lists. If you speak German, the German mailing list has more activity than the English mailing list, but interestingly, CMS Watch recently highlighted Typo3 as a part of a third wave of European Web CMS vendors hitting North America.

In our community of practice, Typo3 has a reputation for being a good solution for small to midscale websites. Usually cheap to implement, although there are a few missing or broken features, e.g search, which will either require an extension or a third-party module. Typo3 does not get high marks for usability, but it is stable and it works. Just like a solid German car.

What’s your take on the future of Typo3?

SharePoint is a very successful product in many organisations, but has certainly also been the product behind a number of failed projects. SharePoint system integrators are often brilliant technical minds, but rarely any good at advising you on the weaknesses of the product and typical project pitfalls.

As with any complex product, there are many factors that impact on your implementation. Unfortunately discussions around SharePoint often turn technical, when in fact many of the critical success factors have little to do with the underlying technology.

From the perspective of the buyer, here are some of the usually overlooked SharePoint success factors:

• Get management buy-in. SharePoint can easily turn into a very expensive ride, particularly consulting fees add up. So get management on your side from the beginning and make sure they stay there.
• Find the right system integrator. The relationship to your agency, consultancy, system integrator or whatever they might call themselves can make or break your SharePoint project. Some system integrators are too busy and lousy at account management, while others are on top of things and thus more successful. Some are mainly technical, while others focus more on project management. Some can make everything shine in PowerPoint, but will have a difficult time actually getting things to work. Also, you need to devote time to continuously talking to your system integrator. There are big differences between the various types of system integrators that you might involve, so be sure to choose wisely, by using some meaningful evaluation criteria to support your decision.
• Reduce risk by starting with your basic requirements. If you initially implement according to the product strengths you will be much more likely to deliver on-time and on-budget.
• Plan for future versions of SharePoint and see if you can be flexible and postpone the implementation of some of your most complex requirements. For the first many months after the release of SharePoint 2010, you need to a avoid first-mover disadvantage.
• Upgrade when you want to, not when Microsoft has a new version. This is not a contradiction of the previous piece of advice, but Microsoft has been known to pressure customers into upgrading. Many enterprises and their IT departments have been struggling to keep up with service packs and some are still using Microsoft CMS 2002 and SharePoint 2003. Any SharePoint upgrade will still be a major exercise and you should plan carefully.
• High-calibre .NET developers will be required. SharePoint has always been a developers toolbox more than an out-of-the-box product, so you’ll need to do some customisation, development and configuration to get it up and running in your organisation.

The above should help you achive successful SharePoint implementations going forward. Do you have other critical SharePoint success factors that should be on the list?

Has anyone in your organisation made an impact through work with the intranet? If so, was it recognised and commented upon? It should be! Establish an internal award to recognize some of the great work going on with your intranet, if you haven’t already done so. This could be an innovative intranet application that solved a business problem, a collaboration feature, good intranet planning, an improved user experience, a new section with valuable content or simply recognition of somebody who has played a leadership role in moving the intranet forward.

The winner could be announced monthly, eg. prominently displayed in the canteen and main entrance lobby, and it could come with a symbolic trophy to sit on the desk for a month. A brief mentioning on the intranet, perhaps with an interview, would also be great visibility.

Ideally, an internal intranet award will also motivate those that publish really useless stuff onto the intranet to do better. Internal recognition, ideally from management, should be an effective way of winning the attention of those who normally don’t listen to the best-practice song from the intranet team. If you want to take it a step further, you could implement a simple benchmarking methodology and publish the results. The winner gets the award, while the transparency makes it visible to everybody who is trailing around at the bottom of the table.

In general, you should always award and praise those that do great work. To get started, I suggest that you open up for nominations from the entire company to suggest inaugural winners.

If you are among the few organisations with an internal intranet award model, please help others by sharing your experiences.

Do you know if your CMS is dead or alive? Whether it has a bright or a bleak future? When higher education software consortium Jasig announced that they would discontinue their support for HyperContent in December 2008, it was a timely reminder that systems do die. Who knows whether other and more popular systems are about to suffer the same fate as HyperContent?

To quote from the announcement:

The community of adopters has not grown enough to attract multiple committers, and new development has been frozen for well over a year. As a result, the application no longer meets criteria for our continued sponsorship.

HyperContent was a fully featured open source  Java-based Web CMS. It had seen some adoption among higher education, e.g. Columbia University, University of Latvia and The University of Hull which is still using it today. HyperContent can no longer be found on the Jasig website, but interestingly the project front page still exists on hypercontent.sourceforge.net. On this page the most recent release from 2006 is promoted as news and Jasig is mentioned as still sponsoring the system.

I am hopefully not the only one who thinks there are too many systems in the Web CMS marketplace. In my years in the young web industry, I’ve seen a few of systems that have died a slow death:

• The Mambo open source development team ended up disagreeing with an effort led by a private company in 2005 and then created a new CMS called Joomla! Today Mambo no longer seems to have a sustaining community.
• Microsoft CMS which in 2006 was replaced by SharePoint. Even today Microsoft CMS is still in use. To be fair, Microsoft continues to provide support and security fixes for a limited period.
• Synkron Via, a Danish commercial CMS originally released in 2006. Local competitor Dynamicweb stepped in to buy Synkron in 2007 and in 2008 CMS Watch dropped coverage of Synkron Via. Earlier this year Dynamicweb slashed the last remaining Synkron Via engineers. To be fair, Dynamicweb is still signing up new customers, so time will tell whether Synkron Via might recover and get back in shape.

If your CMS is riding into the sunset, you are effectively forced to select a new platform and invest time in implementing it. This might be good news as an overhaul of your web infrastructure could be long overdue. However, a scenario in which outside factors control your agenda is less than ideal.

Even though some vendors might be dying, the list of significant systems continue to grow. Alfresco, SilverStripe and Umbraco are among the most recent additions. In other words: Consolidation is still some years out.

When you consider the longevity of your CMS, look carefully at the same factors as Jasig did. A community is more important than features and if the latest major release is from over a year ago, it is usually a very bad sign.

Which CMS could be next?