Richard McManus who writes the very good blog, Web 2.0 Explorer, has published a good review of Preparing for Intranet 2.0, the chapter I recently published with Bill Ives. He says:

I come from a background as a Web Manager, Web services-driven dashboards will result in much more useful, usable and personalized intranets so I'm very familiar with the challenges of creating a functional Intranet in a corporation. Not least of which is to get employees to contribute to their Intranet. In my experience it's been very difficult to get office people to adopt blogs and wikis. So while I absolutely accept that the Web is a collaboration space and a two-way communications medium - principles stated at the beginning of the chapter - the real challenge is to get generally overworked employees to actually use the Intranet. That said, I think the nascent world of web services and personalized start pages (maybe dashboards is a better term to use in the enterprise setting) has a lot to offer corporations….

The key is to deliver to each audience the information and services (which will be collaborative and two-way) that they need to do their jobs. So the Marketing and Sales team for example gets the latest market intelligence, sales data (e.g. from salesforce.com), niche news, their email, spreadsheets, etc. You could even make it more granular - so that sales managers get the more high-level information they need, whereas sales people on the road get jobs data delivered via mobile devices. If anything defines Intranet 2.0, it's that it'll more resemble a web services-driven dashboard - than a wiki or blog….I also think some of the more innovative Web Office tools that I've been profiling here - such as Dabble DB, Jotspot Tracker, Zimbra, ZohoCreator - will be utilized a lot on Intranets over the coming years. I won't repeat my previous posts, but my main point is that those kinds of apps offer unique, hybrid, more collaborative functionality - not found in Microsoft Excel or even Google Spreadsheet…..

I agree with his assessment that the new interface to the Intranet is going to look like a web-services dashboard. As part of our own innovation in this area we are working on new interfaces built on web services dashboards. Here's screenshot of a sample dashboard I built on netvibes:

This includes a sample calendar, my gmal, a few important feeds, my delicious tags, and a presentation that I uploaded to flickr and can now display fully on my page.

On another tabbed page, I have added podcasts that I am tracking:

Netvibes has a nice interface for playing your podcast in the browser:

For this interface we are using a publicly available AJAX desktop in the browser. It is set up with open feeds and inputs from many sources and gives me a nice aggregated view of my key interests.

In the context of an intranet, this kind of interface could aggregate all kinds of information being published behind the firewall: status reports, working group reports, spreadsheets. This is the next generation of interface for our clients.

McManus concludes:

Gilroy and Ives provide an excellent primer on RSS, blogs and wikis for corporations. They show how those tools can be used to increase user participation and create content mashups. And those are compelling features of a modern intranet, for example for knowledge management purposes. But the real power of 'intranet 2.0' I believe is the web services-driven dashboard vision, where the Intranet becomes a much more useful, usable and personalized resource. The key is the Intranet must serve the needs of the employees, such that they simply have to use it day in and day out - in order to do their jobs.

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 12:48 am and is filed under Main Page. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.