Questions About The Future of Intranets

While I imagine this could be argued, as can many of the things I’m wondering about, which is the point actually, in my experience I can see this to be more and more the case. Depending on your situation, what platform(s) you run, how much money is spent on the Intranet, etc. this transformation from “Web site” to application might not be applicable.

In the end the success of an Intranet (or any other project) comes down mainly to achieving goals. How you get there is one thing, and as you all know if you’ve been reading my blog, it can be done for a large (huge!) Intranet with inexpensive (or free) technology.

The goals of most Intranets revolve around, among other things, information sharing, knowledge management, communication and collaboration. The team building the Intranet applies technology to those goals. In my case we used various non-associated Web technologies and solutions and for now everything is working great. But things change, and change fast.

With the upcoming release of Office 2003, SharePoint and related technologies, I don’t think the Intranet, as viewed as a “Web site” or “Web portal” makes sense any more. We will most likely, have the opportunity (money, etc.) to take our Intranet to the next level by leveraging our existing technologies and taking advantage of some new developments that our IS department have brought to our attention.

With the exception of servers, a few rogue machines and my and Brian’s sneaker-net Mac network, everyone down at the hospital has what IS calls the “Golden Image” installed on their machines. The Golden Image is a suite of mainly Microsoft applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) that are supported by our help desk. I imagine this is pretty typical for medium to large organizations. Our only supported browser, in case you haven’t figured it out, is Internet Explorer 5.5. We have a controlled environment to work with. A big plus.

Every employee has an NT login, and soon we will be going to Active Directory with Office and Window Server 2003 to follow in the future. This opens up quite a few doors when it comes to meeting the goals of an Intranet. By adding Sharepoint Portal Server and Team Services we can, for all intents and purposes, eliminate our old Intranet. It would do pretty much everything the current Intranet does, a whole lot it doesn’t and bring everything to a common platform that folks around the hospital are already familiar with — good old Microsoft Office.

In one fell swoop we should be able to create a self-serve, personalized, collaborative Intranet with advanced file sharing, communication, knowledge management and whole bunch of the old functionality included. It will play nice, much nicer than in the past, with our enterprise applications and with a training and, ahem, “forced” adoption, should run itself.

I’m sure there would be problems. That is with anything of this nature and scale. It’s a bit exciting to tell you the truth, to think about how connected an organization can be with these kind of tools — regardless of who makes them. But, yes, there could be problems and I have many questions.

Does an Intranet need to adhere to Web Standards? Well, I guess that depends. In this case I would say it’s more important that it adheres to the company’s standards. Depending on the company this could very well not be an option. I mean not everyone runs Microsoft technologies. Yet.

That said, I imagine there are non-mircosoft solutions that would accomplish the same thing. In the case of the hospital there has been a concerted effort to use MS technologies, so this solution would be a big win.

So, we don’t have to adhere to Web standards. Ahem. Yeah, it’s a tough assumption to swallow. But, lets go for it, for now anyway. Next question — does this application need a custom design? Is the “cookie cutter” Office-gone-Web look and feel good enough? I mean you don’t see many organizations customizing Word’s look and feel for their employees. At this point, if it is an application, this is debatable.

If it does need customization, who’s shoulder does that fall on? Applications are not usually maintained by the Web team. Taken a step further, do the Web folks need to be involved anymore? I would imagine that after the initial set up the Intranet team would be made up of internal communication people and maybe an IA/KM/librarian type. I mean how much custom work (design or development) would be needed? Let alone encouraged, and even then it would fall on application developers I’d imagine.

On the other hand, if there was a need to custom design and development, which there very well could be, I just don’t know, then the Web team might have to evolve into something else. I mean, it would be an application based on Web technologies (CSS, XML) and maybe the Web folks would still need to be involved beyond initial implementation. I mean, we all know that the folks across the lake in Redmond don’t know shit about HTML, right Brian? These Web folks would need to take on new skills and perhaps delve into application development. In my case I could learn some .Net and C#. Eww.

The same types of questions pop up when you think about usability and design. I mean, when you roll out a canned third party application, these things don’t really need to be done. All of that has been taken care of. Right? Don’t look at me, I don’t know!

I’m not sure what the answers to these questions are, part of me is really excited to move on this stuff. The majority of my work on our Intranet is maintenance anyway, so I’d love to push that into the hands of the folks who own the content, and a solution like this should take care of that forever. Plus, to be honest, much of what it can do is really pretty cool and the ROI could be huge. Revamping our Policies and Procedures with this would be huge and fairly easy.

The other, smaller, part of me is loathe to implement this. I’d hate to have the whole Frontpage mess all over again. What a nightmare that tool is, and SharePoint is almost an extension of it. That makes me worry. Plus I was so proud of the open-source, on-the-cheap solutions.

Howwwever…It would be nice to concentrate on the external site and other projects more. Ahh, but, those are stories of their own, for another time.

Times have changed and the solutions we’ve put into place, while much better than a year ago, and more that adequate, will not serve the needs of the hospital forever. Our IS department, with the rolling out of Active Directory, for instance, has opened the door for us to do quite a bit more than we could in the past.

If Office 2003 and SharePoint meet the needs of the hospital, I’m all for it. It’s still early, I may change my mind, or it might be changed for me, we’ll see. For now, bring on the Borg. I’ll let you know how it goes.