Story of An Intranet Redesign - Part Three: Implementation

When we left off I was talking about how we’d for the most part finalized the design and were ready to start building our Intranet out.  While that is true, I need to back up a bit and fill you in on a few things before I can get into talking about the implementation.  Many things happened along the way before we reached this point.
 
As I mentioned in Part One, the site was mostly built with FrontPage with some ASP and straight HTML thrown in.  I talked about how we tackled the structure and IA of the site, but what I didn’t mention was how we planned to re-engineer the site.  We knew that moving away from FrontPage, its “bots” and all the other assorted headaches involved would be the best thing to do, and at some point before I was brought on a Content Management System (CMS) was purchased by the organization. The idea was we could use that.  At the time it seemed like a good idea and a step up from what we had.  I began exploring and learning how to use the CMS.
 
It ran on Cold Fusion so our first step was to get that installed, and then take care of getting the CMS installed as well.  This was a nightmare I’ll not get into, aside to mention it as a warning for those of you who are thinking about using a CMS, as it doesn’t have much to do with anything else.  In any event, I got it installed and began to explore how it could help us replace FrontPage, keep our distributed authorship and keep maintenance issues to a minimum.
 
I quickly found that it was very rigid in many ways.  It was designed specifically for health care, and hospital Intranets, but it just didn’t really fit the bill.  It was very hard to customize the look and feel and at times it was like pulling teeth to use as it was also very slow.  The site management process was poor at best and the actual interface used by content owners to update their content wasn’t much easier to use than FrontPage.  In other words the CMS part of the CMS wasn’t going to cut it.  Too bad we found out after we’d shelled out the (way to much) money for it.
 
At that point I began to look into other options.  We had Cold Fusion installed, and I’d had quite a bit of experience with that at Boeing, and while the CMS didn’t work for the Intranet as a whole, it did have some “modules” that we thought might be of use.  These were things like a classified ads engine (which works great), calendars, things like that.  We decided to try and build on those where we could and keep our eyes open for other solutions, keeping FrontPage running pretty much as is.
 
We eventually came to the conclusion that we needed to figure out a whole new process to how people got information out on the site.  We ran some reports and found out that some sites weren’t being used much and by only a few people.  We also came to realize that most departments didn’t read a “site” but just a way to get information out.  Many ideas came up, from cutting sites, to limiting updates.
 
About that time I began to use Movable Type right here at Asterisk*, and some ideas began forming in my head about how we could maybe use this whole blogging thing to help out on our Intranet.  As you can imagine there was quite a bit of skepticism at first, but after talking to people around the organization I began to realize that Movable Type would really help solve some problems.
 
Press releases and other external news about the hospital were a prime example.  The way we were doing that was with static HTML updates and an ASP press release tool.  It was obvious to me that MT would be perfect for that and the ideas began to flow.  After showing him how it worked, I was able to convince Brian that this was a good thing and he and I began to seriously explore getting this up and running.
 
To be honest, the majority of the work here was not in the actual implementation of MT, although I will get into that a bit, but rather the process involved in having people update the site and get their information out there.  We came up with an idea of having information “channels” tied to the different sections of the Intranet.  This would solve two issues.  One, we could get fresh, relevant content out to the organization on a variety of topics, thus making the Intranet a more valuable business tool, and Two, we could cut down on the amount of departmental and other minutiae type updates that ate up our team’s time.  Throw in the press releases, week brochure ware newsletters, news items and calendar of events and we’ve scored big time.
 
So now we have a situation where MT would be running the home page and the section pages content, and our CMS would handle a few other things like the classified ads.  What do we do about the majority of the other sites, the Human Resources and other informational sites?  Well, we had just planned on keeping those up-to-date ourselves and letting the folks up and running with FrontPage continue to do their thing.  That was until Contribute rolled around.  I jumped all over that when I heard, thinking that here was the solution to our FrontPage and other maintenance problems.  To be honest, we are still working that all out, but the idea is that people who need to make frequent updates will be set up with Contribute to do so.
 
The advantage here is that we can offer distributed authorship easier, cheaper and with less hand holding that what we have done in the past with FrontPage.  We also have the added benefit, with the use of Dreamweaver templates of locking down sites if we need to and maintaining a bit more control.  It’s not 100% rolled out yet, but we’re on the way and it’s going smoothly so far.
 
Ok, so now I’ll quickly go over how we are using Movable Type and a bit about what holds it all together. I’m not going to get into to much detail as it would take too much time, and much of it is fairly straightforward if you know MT and once you understand the update process.  Feel free to post any questions here or email me and I’ll be happy to answer what I can.  That is the whole goal of this, to share lessons learned!
 
The first stage of the redesign was to reorganize the site so that things were easier to locate, add a search feature and update the site wide navigation.  The Intranet is huge, so we didn’t want to tackle reworking every single page.  What we decided to do, in the interim, was redesign the home page as well as the main pages for five major sections of the site, launching the internal pages as framesets with the top navigation added up top.  Before you knock the frameset idea, keep in mind this is and interim solution and pretty much the only way we could add a global navigation solution without touching every page — there are thousands.
 
In any case these pages are CFM (Cold Fusion) pages using includes build in part via Movable Type.  We have two blogs, one that contains all of the main pages and one for our calendar of events.  In the main blog we have categories set for each of the hub sections as well as announcements, our newsletter and a few other special categories.  When someone wants to add something to the “Staff Resources” section and the homepage announcements, news about alternate commuting for instance, they make their entry with MT selection Staff Resources as their primary category and Announcements as their secondary.
 
The entry then shows up on the Staff Resources page with a link to that, via the MT template, on the homepage.  All of the entries are archived and can be changed, re-categorized or deleted at any time.  We have a form set up for any employee to access so they can contact our team about a potential news item or entry.  At this point all of these get funneled to communications via our team, but that will change in the future as we’ll be pulled out of that loop unless there is a problem.
 
It’s been up for less a month now and although we’ve had a few minor problems the site is running smoothly, our maintenance efforts are down and the site as a whole has a lot more current information with higher visibility that it ever has.  Everyone is very happy.  But we’re not done, there is always “phase two.”  Dun dun da!

A small side note : I do want to warn people of one small thing with Movable Type. We have it running on a single Win 2000 server, dual proc with what we thought was plenty of memory, etc. There are times when using MT, usually rebuilding, that it will hog the systems resources and crash the whole site. We’ve not nailed down what the actual problem is, and as soon as we do I’ll post it here, but needless to say it’s a tad bit risky. I would imagine setting up a fail over or even running MT in a different environment would eliminate this problem.
 
So that’s it.  The Story of an Intranet Redesign.  I hope it’s helpful to people, I’m sure it’ll be helpful to me when I have to do this again, as well as in the dreaded “phase two”.  As I’m sure you know, things of this nature are ever evolving and that is one of the reasons why I felt the need to record, to some degree, what has gone before.
 
I encourage you to post any comments or questions you have about this.  I’d love to hear what you all think about what we’ve done and your own stories, challenges and solutions.