Holtz Communications + Technology

The launch of intranet blogs by McDonald’s is significant because it’s not a high-tech company. You can talk about the likes of Sun, Microsoft, and IBM all day long, but the reaction from execs will be the same: “We’re not a high-tech organization.” But holding up McDonald’s—a fast-food company—as an example of corporations turning to internal blogging as a communication channel has the potential to make some executives sit…

In case you didn’t see Bud Gibson’s comment in my post about folksonomies on intranets, Bud pointed me to a post on his blog reporting that IBM will begin experimenting with folksonomies on W3, the company’s massive and impressive intranet. Bud says the initiative is designed to address “a need to maintain the pace of updates to how information is organized in their intranet and…

Intranet blogs are gaining in popularity, but their implementation isn’t quite the same as you’d expect from a public blog. Dennis Hamilton, a 31-year employee of KZF Design in Cincinnati, Ohio, launched an intranet blog called KLINKS in August 2004, and writes about the experience at LLRX.com.

It’s an interesting and personal view of intranet blogs. For example, Hamilton tells the story of posting…

I see a lot of intranets. I mean, a lot of intranets. And I talk to a lot of intranet managers, review employee surveys about intranets, and conduct intranet focus groups. Were you to ask me, “What’s the biggest intranet problem?” my answer would be instant and unequivocal: “Employee can’t find what they’re looking for.”

Call it usability, call it navigation, it all comes down to a wide gap between how…

Writing in CMSWire, Gerry McGovern takes issue with the latest report from the Nielsen Norman Group, “Ten Best Intranets of 2005.” McGovern’s problem with the report is that it focuses on usability instead of strategy:

I found his intranet report a frustrating read because the usability tactics were leading, and the strategy seemed either not there or else following some distance behind.

McGovern cites six…

Greg Reinacker, who founded and runs NewsGator (the company that makes the RSS plug-in for Outlook and hosts an online RSS aggregator) notes in his blog (free subscription to NewsGator required) that the company is working on an enterprise RSS server, code named Dino. Companies are already setting up RSS feeds and, since their employees already use Outlook, NewsGator is…