The 2013 Nielsen report
Nielson’s 10 best intranets in 2013 annual report came out recently. It makes for an interesting read and the mix of entries in the top 10 continues to prove the wide appeal in general of Microsoft SharePoint as the preferred platform of choice, across differing industries, (Microsoft SharePoint accounts for 70% of the winner’s platform choice).
Key findings of the 10 best intranets in 2013 report
- The trend of utilising external help for some or part of the process to design and launch a new intranet continues, with some 8 out of 10 of the winners using third parties to assist them. We think a balance mix of internal and external resources is a good thing, as it helps ensure the business needs are applied with an optimum solution via the technology being used. The obvious point here is that the skills and experience of a particular platform, are often not available internally.
- Involvement of content authors was deemed to be a clear lesson learned from the feedback obtained, which is not surprisingly as ultimately they will and should play a significant part helping you implement your adoption strategy in our view.
- Mega menus, video channels, personal profile pages and personalised home pages all featured high in future trends. Together with combining feeds from the social platforms of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, which shows the growing influence of external social mediums inside an organisation.
- Something we’ve also seen and is reported on is that companies are not specifically interested in developing a mobile specific version of their intranet. We think this is partly because most modern smartphone devices are able to handle content design for normal PC browsers, so therefore reducing the need for a specific device related channel to be created. It’s also frankly an additional cost that has questionable value for an intranet type application. Who really needs to view their full intranet on their phone? Whereas specific solutions, perhaps those on a public facing web portal may do very well offering mobile device focused user experience. Also, it may be sufficient for RSS feeds to be enabled on particular types of content (News and Announcements for example) so that a user can view via a mobile device instead.
In summary
The report speaks positively about the impact and upward trend of Microsoft SharePoint and its use by many of this year’s entries. As the entries would have all been done with SharePoint 2010, and with the many improvements in the latest version just released (SharePoint 2013), it’s pretty clear that SharePoint will feature highly again on the top 10 best intranets report this time around next year.
Maybe some of the SharePoint 2013 based solutions we are involved with right now will be on the nominees list!
Do get in touch if your organisation would like to hear more on how SharePoint 2013 can be used within your organisation, be that to upgrade from an existing SharePoint environment and or to introduce a completely new capability using its new features.
