Intranet redesign, Phase 6: communications, launch and evaluation

Familiarisation

To help staff become acquainted with the new look and feel and functionality before the launch, we published a set of *intranet familiarisation* videos, using the new intranet template, and linked them from the existing intranet via a feature story.

Intranet redesign, Phase 5: migration, content freeze, dual publishing

The end is in sight
Remember that migration plan from phase 2? Having decided to publish back-issues of news stories to the start of 2009, I could quantify how much content we would need to migrate. I managed to cut the original content from 6416 entries down to 3000 entries. Some of this was by losing older news stories. The remainder I did by reorganising content into simplified chunks. Where a section had dozens of one-paragraph pages, I grouped and combined them into fewer pages. I removed out of date content. Cut out duplicated content. Barred the *what's this doing on the intranet?* content.

Intranet redesign, Phase 4: visual design, HTML and CMS build

News delivery design
With several stakeholders interested in news delivery across the intranet, this was an important part of the redesign.

Intranet redesign, Phase 3: wireframe designs and user testing

The previous phase of the project gave me 4 main intranet sections with specific content functions and a detailed map of all the content that was cherry-picked to make the migration to the new intranet. There were going to be a fair few chunks of content left ashore, and no doubt a few stowaways.

Intranet redesign, Phase 2: information architecture and content audit

Back in the good old days when the IT department allowed me to use DOS (the operating system that I was brought up on,) I managed to do some jiggery-pokery and get a complete intranet file-listing. And a few deft keystrokes later, I was spreadsheet-a-go-go.

Intranet redesign, Phase 1: research, surveys and brief

I have been meaning to write up the phases of our intranet redesign project for a long time. I'm going to blog the 6 phases of the project leading up to launch on New Year's Day 2010. The project took around a year and a half to complete, with a core team of 4 people, working in addition to our day to day jobs of intranet publishing, website builds and the usual internal comms intranet panics. This was a major overhaul project, aiming at a big-bang relaunch.

The intranet police are out to get you

If you intend to put content on our intranet; watch out because the intranet police are scouring the pages when you're not looking.

Intranet search engine optimisation (SEO) common mistakes

We have a "family" of intranets and we use Google Search Appliance for our search engine. The quality of search results varies widely across the different intranets.

Pseudo-social functions on news stories

Although I blogged about introducing "social functions" on the intranet, I have to admit that they are not 100% social. In fact, I probably should have called them "engagement tools."