Nielsen's latest Alertbox column is on Intranet Portals. A couple of quotes:
Technology accounts for roughly one-third of the work in launching a good portal; internal processes account for the rest.
The real challenge is to get contributors from individual departments to comply with the portal rules, enter decent meta-data, and refrain from fielding maverick intranet servers outside the portal's scope.
Intranet portals aim to replace the wild Web model with a tool metaphor, where a company's content and services work together instead of undermining each other. Having a single starting point, a single overview of each user's most important services, a single search, a single navigation scheme and information architecture, and a single set of consistent page design templates all combine to make the intranet portal a more promising corporate information infrastructure.
Three good points. And there are few more jems to be found amongst Nielsen's self-promotion. Ignore the fact that Nielsen is trying to sell you a report (and/or his usability services), and focus on some of his good advice.
Posted by Karl
April 1, 2003 02:58 PM