What makes a good Intranet?

I was browsing the MSDN blogs and I came across a post by Eric Jarvi, who posed a customer question about "What makes a good intranet?".  Since I've been building Intranets for a living over the past few years, I figured I'd jump on the saddle and give this bull a chance.  Please keep in mind this is a first draft and mostly centers around an Intranet redesign I did on my current job's site.


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While every Intranet should be customized to each company, the general concepts apply to every company.  I think we can sum everything up into the following needs: news distribution, files & documents and services.

Of course when we think about implementation, we aren't working with 3 categories here, it's more like five or six.  Files and documents can contain items.  For example, the health company I build this intranet for has medical policies, office forms and medical statistics.  These are broken into 2 major pieces, being "Policies" listed by medical department and "eForms" which are just electronic copies of office forms they have already been using.

What can often become on of the biggest pitfalls when designing an intranet is employee ego.  While it's often a good idea to have department pages on the site, it's a waste of time to make lists of people, and categorize departments into sub groups for the sole purpose of listing more people.  It's a waste to generate this content, and it will be a waste of effort to keep this content up to date.  The proper way to deliver worker information, in my opinion, is a company phone directory where you list employee names, title, dept, location, fax and phone numbers and preferably an email link.  With a proper directory server in place, you can retrieve this information easily and store it into a SQL database structure for speedy searching.

Now that I've got the cart before the horse, it's now time to bring up the front page.  But before I do, I'd like to point out there are two ways an Intranet can be structured.  The first is the way you've always seen, that's the classic front page everybody sees, with links to everything on the site.  While this structure is the most common and easiest to deploy, it also provides the user with a lot of information that doesn't apply to them.  The most efficient Intranet is one where the front page is catered to the person viewing it.

A good example would be a page that shows company wide news tidbits, group or department specific news tidbit and links that only apply to that employee.  Depending on what types of technologies your company deploys, this can actually be easier than you think.  A proper directory server should have every user along with groups and departments.  To generate this custom data your news items need to be tagged with a proper category and things like application links and document libraries can be applied to the directory grouping.  When the user views the page, you just need to retrieve their username and query to find out their dept and grouping and retrieve the proper information from your database.

Going back to the more traditional Intranet, which is what I have pictured, is a fairly easy task.  While every Intranet has a different purpose, they're all built from the basic framework.  No intranet can survive if it's purely static.  Just like the internet, your users want content that changes and is highly informative.  It's best to go with a very module based system, so you can reuse your modules across the site and the more flexible these modules are the better.  For example, a proper news module would allow you to insert news, choose a category, and even pick when it will start showing and when it will stop.  This way, you can place your module all over the site and choose options of what category to display.

1. Classic company logo, it speaks for itself.  Above this is a utility bar where I've thrown a "Back to Front Page" link.

2. The search bar gives users quick access to search various parts of the site.  From the drop down you can see users can search the company directory (411), the website content or even the yellow pages (I'm passing the search keyword to a yellow pages website).

3. I feel it's important to gives users quick access to the most important parts of a website.  While your content should be organized in hierarchy of groups, only a small portion of this material is heavily used, and my "Quick Links" gives all the employees shortcuts to the most popular parts of the site.

4. You can't go wrong with a good old fashion menu, it's a common interface that web surfers have grown accustom to.  I'd like to point out that while a horizontal menu doesn't give you much room for subjects, it's quick to read and the less you present to the user, the easier it is to make their decision.  I feel if you can't break everything into 5 or 6 basic subjects, you need to rethink your organization.

5. News content, it's the fodder of the company.  Most companies have some kind of marketing dept that generates in house news.  Here's a great way to digest that material in a digital form.  Please keep in mind the date is important, as well as a good abstract (often the first couple sentences of the news item). 

6. Most news is very time sensitive and gets stale fast, but I still think it's important to give users access to past items.  This "See Past Articles" takes them to a page that lists the titles of all news in that category.

7. It's good to have a "what's new" section, where anything noteworthy should be listed.

8. I've decided that a new employee might be intimidated by the size of the Intranet and while reorganization will improve this, I've created a small section where new employees can grab some useful and vital information.

9. I've split news into separate sections.  My news module can be stuck on any page and even use separate templates.  Different colors makes it obvious these items are separate subjects.

10. Company events are often announced in news items, but after a few days when these events disappear off of the front page.  That's why I feel it's important to have a calendar for the current and next month which gives employees a quick way to check for upcoming events.

11. Just like you may not know who the admin assistant of the financial dept is, most web users don't know who you are.  A classic "contact the webmaster" link is a good idea.  And if necessary, you can add links to a disclaimer and/or rules of web conduct.