Creating Trust and Uniting staff at a global and local level. Kim Sbarcea – ThinkingShift

James explained that one of the things Step Two have noticed is that successful teams deliver successful intranets – in that order. So its important that we think about how intranet teams work and their place in the organisation.

Kim began by talking about how Hollywood perpetuates a myth that leaders – heroes – are born that way This sends out the wrong message about leadership. Business literature too tends to give the wrong impression with titles like “Leadership for Dummies” and “Become a leader in 5 days”.

When it comes to trust we’ve all been on those workshops where you get blindfolded and somehow expected to start trusting each other by stoping each other falling over.

Kim presented her ‘circle of trust’.

Many orgs will say they support home working, but it there’s no trust, when you try to do it your boss still ends up thinking “Are they really working or watching TV?”. So sometimes being an effective leader means letting go – an openness to trust and a willingness to delegate in Kim’s circle.

When it comes to influencing, start with the Why, rather than the What? So don’t go in saying “We’ve got an intranet with XYZ” but “This is why we have an intranet”

Kim tried to introduce ‘no talk thursdays’ to avoid interruptions every thursday afternoon. In Rome! It was disruptive, but let people think about what it means to allow team members to really concentrate.

Kim talked about 3 motivators of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose (something I’ll be exploring too in my talk later today). She gave the example of Atlassian’s 5 rules:
1. Open company, no bullshit
2. Build with heart and balance
3. Don’t #@!% the customer
4. Play, as a team
5. Be the change you seek

Final tip on exploring collaboration:
Marshmallow Challenge. Kids do it really well because they play and prototype rather than debate.

The task is simple: in eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.

Successful intranets – Art not Science. Paul Earl – Aurecon
Paul has been working on a SharePoint 2013 implementation for a management consultancy – 7500 people across 80 offices. Challenge was to merge 2 companies, 2 intranets and 5+ rogue mini sites: “Deliver one Aurecon”.

Step 1: Define the Vision
* Don’t ask anyone what they want
* End users own the need, not the solution
* Don’t be afraid to write the vision yourself

One of Paul’s favourite activities in the end-user workshops was to talk about “A day in the life of”. In effect create a story around a scenario, such as “You’re working on a new project with the Cape Town office…”

In a nutshell, the Vision was a global publishing platform, empowered collaboration, build culture and reinforce brand; pictures not words.

Step 2: The interface
Don’t be too clever with the navigation. If people say “I’m looking for an HR document”, then put it under HR. [Controversially] Paul advocates starting with the org structure, though the menus implemented are things like “Deliver projects / Develop business / Build Expertise”

Step 3: Content
Always the biggest risk. Expect to do a lot of hand holding of content owners to get people to actually get round to working on it. Lie about the deadline! Make it at least twice as early as it actually needs to be.

Step 4: Development
Small team approach so everyone knows what is going on. Did NO documentation, but lead by a workshop and sketching approach. It took less time to build a prototype than it would have taken to get the documents signed off.
Don’t even think about customising SharePoint, that makes it unreliable and hard to upgrade. So Aurecon worked on branding but everything else was code free. When SP2013 came along they could upgrade in just three days. They wanted SP2013 especially for its community features.

Step 5: The results
* 10 months end to end.
* 200 content authors trained
* Soft launch then full go live
* designed mega-menus and a ‘My Shortcuts’ feature

The site design is clean and consistent, with minimal templates to ensure consistency.

Metadata is used extensively, seen as categories for things like news, so that when an article is created there are fields for geography,media type, topic and so-on. Content is then presented using search. This helps in the services area too – people can navigate to HR policies then filter by area if needed.

In communities, categories are used as a primary navigation approach. You can browse from a three-tier list, say, Business Support > Human Capital > Career development. They implemented basic gamification, telling people it was just for fun. One person complained “you make me feel like a child, playing on an Xbox”, only to email back a few days later complaining their points weren’t adding up correctly. One consequence of this is that when people post in communities, they have to fill in the three tiers of categorisation too, but so far the conversations are working well, and functions are seeing the benefit of frequently asked questions being answered by the community.

What modern intranet pages look like. Rebecca Rodgers – Step Two Designs
Rebecca talked about the 7 roles of a home page illustrated with lots of screenshots.

* Coca-Cola – grouping is used to help users know what they can expect to see.
* Department of Human Resources – very simple mobile interface: Search directory, Search Intranet, A-Z. As resolution goes up, the much richer the content becomes, and more multi-column.
* Patricks – strong imagery to communicate what the organisation does.
* Canon – has a character, Pixel, to represent the intranet. They have a calendar on the homepage. Catherine commented that these an work well if everyone can add to the calendar. Don’t necessarily show the standard month view, a “this week” display may be better.
* Sun Water – another intranet with a character, Simon. Simon changes – a St Patricks Simon, Christmas Simon, even a Movember Simon.
* Framestore – highly customisable homepage with drag and drop feed widgets. Within a few weeks 90% of users had customised it.

How Practitioners make search work. Matthias Brunnert – Findwise
Search isn’t just about the search engine, in Findwise’s survey, 64% of respondents saw the issue as being of that we don’t know where to look vs 53% poor search functionality.

Recommendations:
1) Appoint a search manager. 61% of respondents who were satisfied/ v. satisfied with search had at least 1 FTE working on search
2) Get help from search experts.
3) Design a modern interface. UX applies to search too, such as spelling suggestions, type-ahead and refiners (facets) in results.
4) Use Metadata – 73% of users satisfied with search were in organisations that used metadata.
5) Get feedback, for example a feedback form with the results page,
6) Its not about intranet search but all sources employees need.
7) Adapt the search engine to your needs – it isn’t a magic thing that works out of the box.
8) Look at the search logs

Top two search engines? SharePoint 2013 and Apache Solar (Open Source).

Summary
All in, top marks to Step Two for putting on a world class intranet event. The enthusiasm carried on through right to the end, the quality and diversity of the speakers was excellent, and everything went so smoothly too. One theme that really struck me was people talking openly about what it means to be an intranet manager, and I think that reflects the strong local community. I also appreciated that the team had a range of speaker slot lengths to encourage first-time speakers out of the shadows. That’s a smart move – we always need new perspectives! That said, I do hope to be back one day

See also: Rebecca Jackson wrote some excellent summaries of her experience of the conference too – see her blog

Live blogging from Step Two’s Intranet Conference 15-16th May.
Conference agenda

Introduction – James Robertson
The conference theme is “Intranets Unite”, both in the sense of Intranets uniting people in our organizations, and as an event for intranet managers to come together and share. A lively audience of about 160 have come together

James argued that on the theme of uniting mobile intranets, we don’t want 20 different apps – a SharePoint app, an HR one, a Yammer one etc. So a challenge to get ahead of the curve on for us now is to give employees a single front door on mobile devices (I’m not sure I agree with that one – but good to have the debate!).

Coca-Cola intranet: communication + collaboration + transaction + mobility. Jonathan Phillips – Coca-Cola Enterprises (UK)
Jonathan began with a gallery of how their intranet has evolved.
1996-2003 – a very basic looking site, but still some things ahead of its time, such as direct access to an ‘app’ to manage the production line.
2003-2008 – 110 links on the homepage!
2008-2012 – moved to SharePoint and a multi-lingual intranet.

To work out where to take the intranet next, CCE did a ‘digital audit’.

From all this 4 initiatives came out:

But this wasn’t how the team pitched the programme, instead they lead with the drivers of the business – productivity, customer service, employee engagement etc. “A real breakthrough for us” says Jonathan.

Governance – remarkably, the CEO, CIO and other C-level folk come along to their quarterly ‘Communication Council’ meetings. Employees are encouraged to self-provision team sites, so that the barriers to collaboration are very low. Team sites are not deleted, but are archived and removed from search – done for records management purposes. Inactive sites are automatically archived after 6 months.

The new intranet is both local and global, highly targeted, with ‘embedded social’ a a drive towards HR efficiency. Not just a big launch but a long wow – 60 improvements have been introduced post-launch too. The template has 3 main columns: Comms, Collaboration and Transactions.

After some debate over local vs global, the comms are very much locally lead and in local language because CCE felt that this was what engaged people. Leader blogs and banner adverts are all integrated into the flow of this column. Likes and view counts are there, but Jonathan described them as “a little bit of intranet theatre”. Theatre is a recurring theme here – videos too play within the page, a nod to the kind of web-quality experience that employees now expect.

CCE are about to integrate Chatter as their microblogging tool into the Collaboration column.

The transactions column is targeted, for example a “new employee orientation” box for the first 6 months. They have done away with paper payslips, partly for cost savings and partly to give employees another reason to log in. CCE’s HR transaction goal is 70% of queries are dealt with directly by the intranet, 20% go to a call centre where people are referred back to the intranet, leaving only 10% that need special attention.

Mobile
“The mobile phone is the holy grail for us”. CCE asked, what should we distill from the intranet to put in your pocket? Comms news but not blogs, Chatter and Lync, Transactions. Decided to just use the native Chatter and Lync apps, as they have had a much bigger investment in development than they could do in-house.

Mobile just uses 2 columns. SAP is integrated with single sign-on, re-skinned to work simply on a mobile phone to give payslip and leave management. It worked so well that lots of people asked for the same simplicity on the desktop version.

Adoption
CCE spent half a day to invit users to think how social tools would fit into their day. Feeling was that if leaders use it, then people reporting to them will tend to use them too as it legitimises the channel.
The team also put effort into explaining how the different tools fit together:

When social business, collaboration and the intranet meet. Luke Sinclair – AMP
Social been part of AMP’s approach for a while. They were one of Yammer’s first clients in Australia. Over half of 6000 employees signed up voluntarily. Problem was it was separate to intranet, collaboration platform etc. Employees confused about where to go, so AMP decided they needed a single, unified place [are you listening Microsoft?]. Original inspiration to change was a demo from Google of Google Wave.

AMPs Intranet vision: Discover. Connect. Collaborate. Share.
They always felt that employees should design the intranet. Ran a series of design cafes – card sorts, employees drawing wireframes, contextual enquiry. Findings:
* Employees have very creative ways of getting around broken things
* They expect dropbox, google drive like experiences.
* Visuals very very important – every page has an icon
* Access anywhere, any time matters.

Moved to SharePoint 2010 + Newsgator. Social – the activity stream – is great majority of the homepage. [design is very clean, flat, Windows 8 style]. News is driven by the activity stream too. You can filer it to only see the view you want.

Now no sense of ‘leaving the site as you move from collaboration, social and information.
Every employee is an author – anyone can create a news article, so long as it is targeted.

Site is also fully mobile – entire site uses responsive design. at the moment this works well for info consumption, less so for content creation. on the social side they use the Newsgator app. You can log in from any device, not VPN, tokens etc. and everything is accessible.

For launch, AMP created a very polished video called “Work better” with a video of 150 employees taking part. [It features keywords like share and collaborate flying off screens and people following them Pied-piper style to a big swirly word vortex in the lobby -- think you have to see it so hopefully Luke will share it!]. To create a buzz it was released as a ‘chain mail’ email saying “something strange has been happening…”. Luke’s advice “do things wouldn’t normally do – or is against IT security policy”

They did a roadshow with a hub pop-up cafe and a pro photographer to help get good pro photos on profiles. They also did a reverse-mentoring programme for execs on how to use the hub.

Final tip – don’t call metadata ‘metadata’ – its too techie. At AMP they just talk about tags and settings, and to users they just see attractively-designed forms with each field clearly explained with help text.

Secrets of Successful SharePoint Intranets. Michal Pisarek – Dynamic Owl
“SharePoint has no inherent business value unless you apply it to a business problem or opportunity”. Dynamic Owl has delivered intranets for orgs up to 225,000 people. [They have a great blog too SharePoint Analyst HQ]

Memorable quotes from Michal:
“If you don’t know where you’re going with SharePoint, every path looks like the right one”
“SharePoint can be many things but it doesn’t have to be everything”
“To get it right, you need to think of it as being a Change Management project with SharePoint as the enabling technology.”
“The power of SharePoint is in its breadth, not its depth”

SharePoint Intranet Pitfalls:
1. An intranet and collaboration can be vastly different things
2. The easy things can be costly, the difficult things cheap. e.g. making SharePoint look attractive.
3. Don’t boil the ocean – ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’

Why is it so difficult to get people to use SharePoint?
1. People have alternatives like email and Google drive. Unlike, say, an HR system.
2. Uses have unclear expectations of the benefits of things like team sites
3. Lack of training. SharePoint is not intuitive, and people need to understand the WHY as well as the HOW. Don’t assume people even really know how to search – for example how to filter results.

SharePoint Tips
1.Don’t sell content management as being like using Word. Train content authors really early – halfway through the project, not just before launch.
2. Intranets can grind to a half after the staff party – 10Mb images are still 10Mb even if you scale (unless you use SharePoint 2013).
3. Every department name you have should be a best bet pointing to their ‘about’ info. Same for common actions like travel, holidays, locations and training.
4. In SharePoint 2013 you can target content to people based on people’s’ interests listed in their profile, such as sending a message to everyone interested in tennis.
5. The power of forms in SharePoint is under-exploited.
6. Don’t just use a Team Site. We tend to think every collaboration problem is solved by a Team Site. but the original idea of the Team Site was that it was just an example that organizations would customize.

Creating a Digital Workplace – Jo McBain, Wannon Water
Jo talked very openly about the psychology of becoming an intranet manager. She began by explaining her decision to start seeking out opportunities and deciding to be pro-active in her organization [always interesting to hear how people end up in this role].

Jo talked about the frustration of feeling invisible – for example when IT strategy decisions are made without involvement of the intranet team. It took a leader to intervene in the mis-alignment and join people up. But getting there again required that shift of mindset to keep putting yourself forward and raising your hand to become more visible rather than just feeling frustrated at being overlooked.

A step forward was putting a working group in place. Initially, working out role descriptions and definitions was creating barriers, so in the end the group just got going without
a clear structure and that is actually working well.

Tip from Jo: When seeking buy-in, don’t forget to include Executive Assistants, they often want to change things too and have the ears of the leaders.

Large organisations, large intranets. Tamsin Stanford
Tamsin is formerly from ANZ and Australia Post and shared things she wished she’d advised herself to do in her projects. She had 5 different attempts to get funding to update the ANZ site… then moved to Australia Post.
1. You need to keep executive on board so that support doesn’t stop when the funding starts. They can help buy you time during change where not everything can be delivered in the first phase. Avoid the generic presentation shown to all the execs, you need to tailor it to show you understand their strategy. For example, talk to call centre managers about how quick answers to employee questions makes staff more available to answer calls.
2. Build a team. You’re going to need emotional support! Like Jo, Tamsin advocated talking to PAs, they are often the people others go to when they can’t find answers, so will know what needs fixing on the intranet.
3. Start small. Tamsin’s team did a before-after analysis of time taken to find answers on key pages. By fixing IA and re-writing, they showed $5.8M of productivity improvements.

Influencing stakeholders with stories. Shawn Callahan, Anecdote
[disclaimer: my main lesson from Shawn's talk is that we learned a lot from all the stories he told, not from the lessons we infer from the stories. However, I can't type enough to capture the stories - and writing them doesn't work anyhow - so here's the lessons, but I recommend you try to hear Shawn instead].

Shawn began talking about trust as:
Credibilty – are you skilled?
Reliability – will you deliver on your promises?
Intimacy – you trust the people closest to you
divided by self-interest.

For us, stories are no the Hollywood-blockbuster epics, but the small day to day anecdotes we tell.

A lot of the time people say things are stories but aren’t. Try thestorytest.com. Real stories
1) Have a time marker. Even if it’s “A while back” or “Just the other day”. “Once upon a time” works less well in business…
2) They are made up of events. What makes them powerful is that we infer causality from this.
3) They are about people. We care about people, not divisions or products.

Overall, a story is a promise that something will happen, that you will learn something. Contrast this with offering an opinion where people naturally push back. We tend to react to stories by wanting to draw out the ending.

It can help if the story shows that we are like the listener. We tend to trust people like us – a ‘who am I?’ story.

Beware of writing stories out. When we write them we feel compelled to make them more like prose paragraphs and not how we actually speak. For example repeating ourselves. That means you can’t put them on your intranet and have the same effect. Moreover, stories are much more about pictures than words when it comes to having emotional impact. If you want to put them on your intranet, unpolished, verbatim video perhaps works best.

Future stories.
These work great in workshops, but if you try to share them with people outside the workshop then people won’t believe it. But as William Gibson said “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed”. So find the example of where the future is already happening and start talking about that. It helps people believe it can happen elsewhere.

Eliciting stories
Begin with when? and where? If you begin with Why? you get opinions and justifications. Get people to share experiences and work out why yourself.

Intranet Mythbusters
The day ended with a panel session where 4 of the speakers were given a common intranet myth to despatch. The very talented Matt Magain from UX Mastery did a spledid job of capturing it in a cartoon:

End of Day 1. See Day 2

For another view, Rebecca Jackson did a splendid summary of her experience at the conference too. Rebecca’s blog

We originally released this last October as a text version inspired (like so many) by the Cluetrain manifesto. We’ve now produced a graphic version with the help of businessilllustrator.com.

Full image | Text only version

Download as .pdf  (6Mb)

image: Kheel Center, Cornell U.

The agenda for the digital workplace is becoming established from an architectural perspective, but what are the things we need to preserve from the employee\worker point of view? Inspired (like so many) by the market-driven Cluetrain manifesto, here is our take on a manifesto for employees, contractors and freelancers.

The Digital Workplace Manifesto

1. Work is no longer a place. Let me be productive where I choose, but respect my home life too.
2. Manage the outcome, not the process. Trust that I’m working productively when you can’t see me, but hold me accountable for the results.
3. The digital workplace should be a pleasure to use. If it’s not as good as my digital home life, let me bring in my own devices.
4. Let me be myself online. My profile is who I am in the digital workplace, and many of my working relationships may be with people I don’t get to meet
5. Learning is good for me and the company. Give me the opportunity to acquire knowledge from outside and in, and the chance to use it well
6. Not everyone is an early-adopter. Give support and guidance to those that need it, but also freedom to learn by playing for the self-starters.
7. Work doesn’t stop at the firewall. Our digital workplace should encompass customers, suppliers, partners and contacts.
8. Everything should be geared to helping me do the work that matters. Remove the irritants like multiple logins. You know who I am – once I’m logged in I should get everywhere I need to go.
9. Working relationships involve understanding each other. Let me express my views and I’ll listen to yours
10. Collaboration only works if we do it the same way. The best tool is the one we all use, otherwise we create digital divides to match physical ones.
11. If I don’t like it, I can always leave

This is version 1.0 of an original version produced in February 2012 within a presentation called “Loving the intranet”. We’re sure there are more refinements that could be made – what would your version be?

Summary

Document-based collaboration has always been at the heart of what SharePoint is about and by 2010 most of the functionality was there. 2013 consolidates these strengths and brings some refinements, such as SkyDrive and improved navigation, without any large innovations. Where 2013 really wins is the integration between social and more structured collaboration, but overall the user experience needs to do more to keep up (see forthcoming posts on Mobile and User Experience).

Projects and Other Site Types

Remember all the site templates such as decision meeting workspace, social meeting workspace etc? Well they’re all going in 2013.  This is a good thing – they caused more confusion than help, and generally I think it is better to start with very few options and then help site owners tailor where needed. There is a useful new template, called Project. Between Team Sites, Projects Sites and Communities, the templates now have a much clearer sense of purpose.

The Project template adds in a project summary timeline at the top (see screenshot) that picks up task and calendar entries within the site. The usual document libraries are still there and announcements are replaced with a more social project newsfeed area. Standard Team Sites are stripped back, with just documents, newsfeed and ‘Notebook’ (taking you to One Note online). They do, however, begin with a Get Started bar (see the screenshot at the start of this post), encouraging you to add tasks, lists and basic branding. Behind the scenes are more extensive look-and-feel options, thankfully well hidden as the design selection has a visual appeal matched only by looking at PowerPoint 1.0 slides with a migraine.

Collaboration Through My Site

My Site’s file sharing has been enhanced. There is SkyDrive, a Dropbox-like  feature that is accessible within the desktop file explorer, and will synchronize edits made offline. This makes much more sense than trying to sync through Outlook, as 2007 and 2010 did. My Sites also have useful views of “Shared by me” and also “Shared with me”, which aggregates files that my colleagues have given me access to (the screenshot shows this and the new document preview pop-up). Tasks are now much more manageable, with an aggregated task view being a default page on My Sites. This shows not only tasks across all my projects, but those in Exchange as well (and the two can be connected and kept in sync, as with SharePoint 2010). See Part 3 of this series on SharePoint 2013 Social Features for more about My Sites.

Site Hub, Memberships and Community Portal

The Site Hub is a page accessed from the top bar that shows all the sites you participate in. This addresses a widespread frustration with earlier versions, where users sometimes complained that they created a team site and then couldn’t find it again. Even though My Site showed memberships of other sites, it only worked if you were in the ‘Member’ group and not if you were the site owner, a nuance that made little sense to business users. Site hub now lets you build up a ‘follow’ list and also suggests other sites you might want to follow (though it doesn’t appear to do it as intelligently as it might– for example it would be good if the first suggestion was a site where you had been granted new access or ownership). Microsoft has also put thought into group membership management, acknowledging that the permissions model was often confusing. Instead of a behind-the-scenes “Add to Group” model, there is a clear “Share Your Site” tile, where you can list people to invite.  Site owners also get a “pending requests” dialogue so they can see non-members who have asked to join. However, some people are concerned that the “Share” button will lead to increasing SharePoint sprawl if users confuse sharing documents with sharing sites. A similar idea to the Site Hub is the Community Portal, which can be used to show a list of all community sites that an employee might want to join. A directory of communities is a great idea, but SharePoint 2013 falls foul of the same catch-22 it has always suffered from; it only shows communities that you already have access to. There are sometimes good reasons why a community may want to operate in private and only show contact details rather than give everyone visitor access up-front.

Office Integration

Microsoft are planning their largest across-the-board update for 2013, bringing in a new version of the Office Suite and SharePoint at the same time.  Although the ideal is that companies also upgrade in-step, from a user point of view, I’ve not seen anything that would stop a combination of, say, Office 2007 and SharePoint 2013 sitting together. What you’d lose is the ability for several people to edit documents at the same time, and from an adoption point of view, the backstage feature in Office 2010 onwards makes it more obvious that you can work with SharePoint directly from within Office (something people tend to overlook without training). One of the mantras of SharePoint 2013’s design has been “cloud first” rather than on-premises installation. Employees are unlikely to notice this until they start using Office 2013 and see that the default “Save as…” drive is SharePoint SkyDrive rather than their local disk.  This is a welcome step in nudging people towards a mode of working in SharePoint rather than storing in SharePoint.

The lightweight, online versions of Office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel and One Note) have been updated with a metro look to align with the Office 2013 styling (see screenshot above). The capabilities stack up well compared to, say, Google Docs, and they have a good track record for preserving the fidelity of document formatting when moving between the web and desktop applications.  Capabilities are enhanced, with Word gaining a Page Layout tab, for example, and PowerPoint offering impressive styling options. Real-time joint editing works well in Excel and One-Note web apps, showing changes on the fly. For Word and PowerPoint, changes continue to be buffered and only show up after a save. Justifying this, Microsoft define 3 levels of  collaboration: Semiformal-authoring, Formal Co-authoring and Comment and Review, and argue that the formal co-authoring model for Word is the right one: “you don’t want half-formulated thoughts shared with other authors”.  I disagree – often collaborating on a document does involve discussion about the wording of a line or paragraph, not people simultaneously changing different paragraphs. One Note would be the work-around tool, but Google Docs trumps SharePoint here.

What Are The Alternatives?

If your collaboration strategy is largely document-based, and you don’t have strong requirements for records management, then there is little to rival SharePoint for its range of capabilities and integration with Office. Version control, workflow integration and metadata are all strong. The improved integration between social and more structured collaboration is also attractive, allowing a freer flow between discussions, managing and document editing. In practice, however, very few organisations manage to go beyond using team sites as glorified network drives, so much of this capability is wasted. Rivals such as Google Enterprise and Huddle are therefore making inroads, offering a superior user experience and much better mobile support than SharePoint, but losing the familiarity of the Office way of doing things. For those looking at a cloud-based solution, SharePoint 2013 via Office 365 is likely to be competitively priced from an IT perspective, but organisations need to carefully evaluate the total cost of adoption and be realistic about how much functionality will really be exploited.

Summary

There’s much to like about SharePoint 2013’s social enhancements. The most immediately visible change is the introduction of the newsfeed, giving the microblogging capability that was lacking in 2010. The second headliner is a new type of site called “Community” that brings together existing social elements and adds badges and levels too.

These, along with tweaks to social pages, make SharePoint 2013 a much more promising basis for building a social intranet. Most significantly, SharePoint offers integrated continuity across collaboration that few other offerings can match:

• Unstructured – social in SharePoint and real-time using Lync
• Semi-structured – team site collaboration around documents and tasks
• Structured – processes implemented as workflows and records management

Although it may not be the best at any one of the above, the continuity of moving between modes is invaluable compared to, say, running the social element on a stand-alone Yammer platform.

Profiles and Newsfeed

My Sites have progressed significantly (though the “My Site” name itself is no longer there – you just see your name and “About Me”, plus top bar links to Newsfeed and SkyDrive (see screenshot). This is much less confusing than the “My Content | My Newsfeed” separation of old.

The newsfeed is now two-way, meaning people can reply to comments just as they can on Yammer or Facebook. The newsfeed shows status changes to anything that you follow, so you can follow a document or site as well as people. Like Twitter, you can reference people using @person, and tag comments with #hashtags. SharePoint helpfully suggests names as you type from your followers, directory and metadata in the term store.

Following tags is interesting – if you click on a tag you get the option not just to follow it, but also who else follows that tag, a good way to see shared interests. You can tag photos and videos with people’s names too, Facebook-style.

Through your profile, you have fine-grained control over privacy settings for your updates. (see screenshot below). This is a wise move by Microsoft as a feat of being too visible often holds back adoption in the corporate world where people tend to be much more conservative than the social media hype might indicate. Similarly, when you add a status update, you can choose to share it only with members of a team site, for example.

My Content has been replaced  by “SkyDrive Pro”,  from which you can share documents with anyone and also sync documents offline. The SkyDrive becomes visible within Windows Explorer, so the whole experience is very much like Drop Box and makes far more sense than the Outlook-based sync of old.

People search works as well as in 2010, preserving the dynamic organisation chart view as before. Comparing against our people finder checklist, a full implemented and adopted 2013 directory with Exchange and Lync could potentially score 24 out of 25.

Communities and Gamification

Over the past few years, I’ve been advising clients to set up templates for Communities so that they’re distinct from departments and project teams. Communities are characterised by groups of people that have an area of knowledge or practice in common. Unlike departments, community members sit in different parts of the organisation, and unlike projects, communities are not time-bound. They work best, however, when people know they are part of the community, which is why providing an online sense of place and identity is so important.

It’s good to see SharePoint now supporting this model explicitly, and with the right process and culture in place will go some way to bridging the online silos that SharePoint is sometimes accused of reinforcing.

Communities begin with a Yammer-like template centred on discussions. The feature set is now pretty complete:

• Discussions can be grouped by category as well as tagged
• Posts can be flagged as a ‘Question’ to make it clear you want help
• Ratings can be set to star ratings or “like” only
• A “What’s hot” list is built in, along with “Top Contributor” and “What’s Happening” views, all of which help keep the momentum of a community going
• There are moderation tools so posts can be flagged for intervention, promoted to “Best Answer” etc.
• The full rich editor ribbon is there (perhaps alarmingly) allowing people to insert pictures, documents, video and even HTML code

Gamification has crept in too, with support for badges and reputation settings (click on the first image where you’ll see a badge for “Professional”).

• Gifted Badges are allocated by the moderator, and can either be a series of bars or moderator-defined categories. This is useful to identify people with specific roles such as “Moderator” or “Subject Matter Expert”
• Achievement Badges are linked to levels that can be defined per-community and linked to different kinds of activity such as being voted “Best Reply”. This is a great way to give a community a bit of character, for example, a gardening community could have “Sprout”, “Sapling” and “Tree” levels

I do have several reservations about gamification, and I worry that because these tools are built-in, they may be thoughtlessly deployed and backfire badly. However, Microsoft have at least put in place a decent amount of flexibility to adapt the deployment to each situation.

Do You Still Need Newsgator, Yammer or Other Add-ons?

Following much debate about the meaning of Microsoft’s Yammer acquisition, there was a concern that it meant SharePoint 2013’s social features would continue to miss the mark. I don’t think this is true. If SharePoint 2013 had a decent mobile client, there would be little point in running a Yammer network alongside a SharePoint 2013 implementation unless it has already taken root and it would be hard to migrate users over.

If you’re thinking of piloting Yammer, and in the absence of any current way to merge Yammer and SharePoint accounts, I would advocate not initiating a stand-alone Yammer network and consider moving to SharePoint communities sooner in 2013 instead. If you want to just experiment with microblogging, a more integrated tool like Attini Talk or Social Factor would mean less of a shift for users later on and has better potential for migration.

Something like Newsgator is trickier. Although a feature-by-feature comparison on paper would show SharePoint 2013 having moved much closer, Newsgator has a more joined-up vision of how a social intranet should work, meaning employees and business owners are likely to find it more intuitive.  Newsgator have not yet gone public with how they will respond to SharePoint 2013 treading on its toes, but it means that the business case to purchase Newsgator (and it’s not cheap) just got much harder. If time allows, I’d pilot with 2013 and see if your business outgrows the functionality before looking at third party tools. Just to add to the confusion, Yammer will be integrated with SharePoint via Newsgator.

If you already have Newsgator, then it is compatible with SharePoint 2013, but it is unlikely that you’ll be able to migrate Newsgator + SharePoint 2010 into SharePoint 2013 alone, meaning that success creates a lock-in effect. But if you need that level of social functionality now, then Newsgator is a good move, it might just turn out to be an expensive one.

Summary

If you’re looking at SharePoint 2013 as a Content Management System (CMS) for publishing pages in your intranet, then the main improvement is the ability to publish content across sites more easily.  Improved moderation for two-way communication will also be a welcome addition. However, the out-of-the-box tools for managing news article remain primitive and confusing for the casual user. Microsoft claim that it is easier to brand your intranet, though caution against some changes.  Machine translation may be attractive to those running international sites, but don’t expect a polished result.

Flexible Publishing

2013 moves closer to the idea of a news centre where stories are published in multiple locations. It is based on the idea of catalogs and search-based publishing. You can take a list of news stories, for example and expose it as a catalog. A new content search web part on another site will then pick up stories from that catalog and re-display them. This comes into its own when you use metadata as part of the content search. For example, you could have a catalog of all news stories from each country tagged with #countryname, and then create a page that shows all news stories from Europe on one site, and all stories from Asia on another. Similarly you could have a catalog of all internal vacancies, but only show finance vacancies within a Finance Community site.

The same content search web part can be used to quickly create “What’s Hot” features by searching for the top 10 stories by number of views. There are also refiner web parts that will give users buttons to filter their views. For example, “Show me all stories from today | this week | this month”.

This isn’t entirely new to SharePoint, but there used to be a limitation that this wouldn’t work across different site collections (using the Content Query web part) and this has now been overcome. If you want to know more,  Laura Rogers has written a great summary on the content search web part.

Two-way Communication

SharePoint has had the ability to add comments and ratings to news stories and leader blog posts for a while, but many organizations have been hesitant in deploying this feature. Although 2013 won’t fix any deep-seated cultural reservations, it does at least make it easier to manage this process with additional moderation tools:

• Employees can flag any comment as “Report to Moderator”. The site administrator will see a list of flagged posts to respond to
• You can configure posts to have star ratings, a ‘Like’ button, or no ratings
• You can make a post  ‘Featured’ so it rises to the top. For example, if there is a run of comments on a topic, then you could have an official response that is made the featured post
• Using the content search web part (see above) you can create leader board views such as “Stories with the most comments” or “Highest rated comments”

See Part 3 of this series for more about SharePoint 2013’s social features.

Machine Translation and Multiple Languages

Often, when I introduce SharePoint to internal communicators and talk about handling multiple-languages, people excitedly ask if that means their articles will automatically be translated. It was a shame to dash their hopes and explain that still needed to happen manually. With 2013, however, there is access to an automated translation service in the cloud. It works on documents, pages and sites. You’re likely to see it if you use variations as it is integrated into the workflow (see screenshot), but it also appears in Office Apps such as Word. Sadly, in-place translations are not supported, so user’s don’t see a button saying “Translate This Page Into English” when they land on it, for example.

At this stage it’s not clear what the quality of translations will be like. The field has progressed greatly in the past few years, but still falls short of the requirements for most professional-level internal communications. The use of a cloud-based service may also create security issues in some companies. Overall though, it’s very encouraging to see this technology entering the toolkit.

Variations are SharePoint’s way of handling language variants on a reference site. For example, you might have a main site in English and want to create the same site in Spanish, French and German. Variations put the workflow in place to keep the content and layout consistent between the 4 sites. The feature was introduced in SharePoint 2007, but didn’t work well until 2010. In the new release, it’s also supported in the Office 365 edition.

Branding

Up until now, companies using agencies have sometimes become unstuck when trying to turn the mock-up into a reality on SharePoint. Microsoft claim that 2013 is much easier to brand:

“To brand a SharePoint site, designers just create a site design as they typically would, by implementing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Designers can create these files by using their design tool of choice, whether that is Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, or some other HTML editor. You don’t have to use SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio 2013 to brand a SharePoint site.”

However, a slightly conflicting blog post from the SharePoint team also advises “Use SharePoint as an out-of-the-box application whenever possible - We designed the new SharePoint UI to be clean, simple and fast and work great out-of-the-box. We encourage you not to modify it which could add complexity”. I take this to mean that you can change brand elements like the banner and colour scheme, but if you don’t like the metro styling of things like the ribbon then you’re stuck with it.

Other Changes

Some other useful touches include:

• Image renditions – you can create set sizes for images on your site, such as thumbnail, medium and large sizes. When you add an image, you can apply the appropriate rendition, improving consistency
• Improved video support – videos can be embedded, more formats are supported and you can choose a frame as the thumbnail. You can have video renditions too, for example high- and low-bandwidth versions
• Embed external media – the rich text editor now lets you embed any HTML content, including YouTube videos, Bing Maps etc, (see blog post by Stefan Bauer)
• Drag and drop navigation menus – a more direct way to re-structure menus
• Word format integrity – SharePoint now recognises Word formatting and shouldn’t go haywire when you paste directly into the content editor

Still Missing

What I find odd for a platform so widely used for internal communication is that there is nothing out of the box designed around a news centre concept. You would expect there to be a web part designed to manage a column of stories with controls over thumbnails, abstracts, publishing date etc. but this still isn’t the case. Instead companies have to resort to creating custom lists or adapting the blog web part. It’s do-able, but is feels like a very basic starting point for something done almost universally.

Summary

1. Don’t Plan Your Intranet in Isolation

You can expend a lot of energy on trying to define the role of an intranet within a digital workplace, worrying about the boundary between a traditional intranet site and SharePoint collaboration sites, for example. However, such boundaries have little meaning from an employee perspective: they just want to find things, do things or share things, ideally without any extra passwords or interfaces to learn. Intranet strategies need to be planned with reference to all the other collaboration and communication changes that are underway within your organisation, otherwise the employee experience will always be fragmented.

2. Govern Across the Whole Digital Workplace

Equally, it can be tempting to create a steering group and policies just about intranet content, but this can be hard to enforce; people either don’t understand the boundaries, or will choose to bypass them. For example, if your governance says a team can’t have a micro-site on the tightly-controlled intranet, they’ll create one on the open-to-all wiki instead. Governance therefore needs to be joined up across communication and collaboration services.

3. Break Down the Walls

The notion of the firewall being impenetrable needs to change. Even the “intra” part of “intranet” is starting to look misleading. To employees the firewall is largely an inconvenience: there is more knowledge outside your company than inside, but the firewall can stop them from reaching it through sites such as LinkedIn or Twitter. Even from a corporate point of view, permeability has attractions. If you outsource your HR services to a third party, for example, those people need to provide information on your intranet. And how are the staff of your partners meant to help with your company objectives, if they can’t see all your engaging communications as well?

4. The Intranet is Owned by Employees Too

When consulting for companies, people often tell me their intranet is top-down, distant and “corporate”. Intranet managers in turn tell me they have launched commenting, blogs and forums but they fell flat. Just as people need to have a sense of their own identity in the physical workplace, so they need a presence on the digital workplace if they are to truly engage with it. This means encouraging people to build profiles on the intranet, share their activities and have a continuity of that identity across all the different systems they might use. Many working relationships now are with people we rarely get to meet, so we have to facilitate relationship-building online as well.

5. No More Big-Bang Launches

Traditionally, intranets seem to run on roughly three year cycles: the big budget, long-term build project, launch-day party and then slow decline.

This is a risky strategy. Big budgets are hard to secure, guessing the future is error-prone and building adoption takes much more than a good launch campaign. Increasingly, successful intranets are being built by smaller but more frequent iterations. This means fewer dramatic upheavals for the business and gives opportunity to pilot, learn and gradually expand – and approach much better suited to a social world where you can never be sure how employees will react until you try it out.

Photo courtesy of the past tends to disappear

It looks official that Microsoft will acquire Yammer. This has led to lots of speculation about why and what it means for intranets.

I suspect that Microsoft are more interested in the user base than the technology, as this is pretty trivial to replicate, and they were already on that path with Office Talk. It may also be a more predatory move to knock-out a fast-growing rival to Office 365, particularly as Microsoft is now saying SharePoint is moving to be ‘cloud first’

One of the better cases is put on the Intranetizen Blog, arguing that integration will be a big plus if you’re one of the many organisations running both platforms at the moment and struggling with multiple logins, profiles etc.  I think they’re right – it’s especially good news if Yammer has infiltrated your organisation virally and you don’t really want it as a platform, but can’t get rid of it either.  Intranetizen also argue that it’s probably bad news if you have SharePoint + Chatter, Tibbr or Jive due to the functional overlap. Mind you, the next release of SharePoint is likely to see much more overlap anyhow.

Read-Write Web argue that it is to beef up weak social tools in SharePoint but I’m not convinced. The next version (“Wave 15″) due end of this year is said to be much better anyhow and integration of a disparate technology can be harder than creating from scratch.

Given how close the next SharePoint is to beta release, I doubt Yammer will be integrated at first, but Microsoft are said to be moving to more frequent release cycles so it could well happen in the first service pack around this time next year. It’s much more likely that you will feel the impact earlier if you’re on Yammer but not SharePoint, because Microsoft will be keen to start nudging you towards Office 365. From an intranet manager point of view, I’d probably be holding off any Yammer-related decisions for the next 6 months until the product paths are clearer.

See also:

•  view from William Rogers of CorasWorks
• excellent appraisal of Yammer’s offering from Alex Manchester