Story Of An Intranet Redesign -- Update

Ok, before I get started, I need to clarify for everyone that the redesign I talk about in the Story is only the first phase of an ongoing effort to revamp our Intranet. The most important work, the information architecture, has been done and while it will grow and evolve, won’t be completely revisited for awhile. As always we will be doing on-going user testing and the like, but our main focus at this point moving forward is the implementation of the Intranet, rolling out tools, features and apps, as well as rebuilding the platform upon which the Intranet rests.

This will take quite awhile and as you can imagine things can change at a rapid pace. Right now our focus is making UI improvements, while at the same time re-building the individual parts of the Intranet. Along the way we are experiencing a major shift within the organization that will lead to us probably re-doing the whole thing. But more on that later.

Let me talk about what has gone well and what hasn’t. For the most part our implementation has been great. Movable Type did have a few problems, mostly with server processes bogging down and crashing the site, but we’ve been able to work around that. MT isn’t all that friendly with our NT/IIS server based platform. A word of advice, if you intend in using MT with multiple users, have your MT users always log out when they are done working. It’s been noticed that these processes don’t always end when the browser session ends.

Aside from these minor technological issues Movable Type has been a terrific solution for us. We’ve been able to roll it out to content providers, as well as use it ourselves to help free up our team resources from the drudgery of that kind of maintenance.

Speaking of maintenance, we are sill working on rolling out Contribute. We’ve come across many little problems, mainly with permissions and redirects via IIS. My guess is these problems are due to the Mickey Mouse way most of our site is built (Frontpage, lots of virtual directories, etc.) not anything caused by Contribute itself. Rebuilding those pages in a more consistent form is part of our ongoing work.

Cold Fusion, which we are using to serve up our main homepage and sub-pages, all tied in with Movable Type, seems not to play well with our search technology, ISS Index Server. That has been a problem, for some reason it just doesn’t want to index the .cfm pages. We are looking into that.

Aside from those implementation issues, we’ve had some few folks not comfortable with the UI, the colors, and other little things like that. We’ve had to change the way people access the phone directory for instance, simply because we had moved it and that is used more than anything else on the Intranet. All of this I chalk up to re-education of our user base, once they learned the new ways of doing things, most people are very impressed how easy it is to locate information. A big indication that all of our work with the IA is paying off.

So, we’re chugging along and things are going smoothly so what does the future hold? Well, I’ve got quite a bit to tell you all on that subject, but it’ll have to wait a few more days until I get my head around some things. Like I said before, things can change quickly. Let’s just say this — our Web team, at this moment safely nested in Marketing/Communications is slowing converging with IS in many ways and our Intranet is slowly converging with our enterprise systems and applications. We are in VERY close proximity to Renton and big changes are coming down the pike. In other words, most of the above solutions will be having a fairly short life span, even though they are working very well.

Yeah, I was scared at first too, but now I’m pretty excited.