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I've seen a lot of hype about SharePoint, Microsoft's solution for, well, just about anything related to online.
The product has been promoted as a Information Management system, as a Web Content Management system (Web CMS), as a replacement for shared drives and file systems, as an enterprise search tool and even as a platform for enterprise applications.
Amazingly enough it can fulfil all of these roles. However like other jack-of-all trades, it's not necessarily the best product for any one of them as detailed in this post, Advice for (prospective) SharePoint customers.
I've particularly been seeing a lot of push for SharePoint in the public sector.
Where agencies have selected a Microsoft technology path there's many good reasons to consider SharePoint as well - less complex environments to maintain, easier to train and recruit staff, there's plenty of synergies that can be leveraged with other Microsoft products.
However when considering any product for a role as important as being the engine of your online channel it's valuable to understand your options and undertake appropriate due diligence before investing public funds.
For instance, the initial purchase price of a Web CMS solution is a very small part of the picture, there's the lifetime cost to consider as well.
Generally I'd expect to use the same platform over a 3-5 year window at least, with substantial ongoing development to meet changing organisational needs. The cost of this development can be substantial.
Another major consideration is the staff costs related to content authoring and publishing. This is the real cost to staff in terms of the time required to use a system in the workplace. While a Web CMS might be cheap to purchase, if it is difficult or time-intensive to use that will seriously compromise the success and the viability of your online channel.
Other factors to consider include content migration, the split of responsibilities between IT and business areas, the cost of extensions to the system and the overall network and hardware costs of the system.
So while SharePoint is one options - and I've seen excellent implementations of the technology in agencies (such as in DEWR) - there are over 140 Web Content Management Systems available for purchase in Australia.
Many of them work very well within a Microsoft environment.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Considering using Microsoft SharePoint for government websites and intranets? Consider your options carefully | Tweet |
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Intranet day - global event | Tweet |
It has felt a little like 'Intranet Day' in the last few days as I've posted a number 0f times about intranet developments.
It really was Intranet Day on 18-19 June - a global online event where intranet managers were able to discuss their intranet strategies and a number of large organisations such as the BBC, IBM and Microsoft demonstrated their intranet functionality.
The podcasts and slides from various presentations on the day will be available shortly at the IBF website.
I confess that I missed the event - hadn't even heard that it was taking place until it was over - so am eagerly awaiting these presentations. I'll post again once they are up.
If you also missed the event it is worth looking out for some of the Intranet Tours in Australia.
Or simply organise your own as I've done in the past.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Breaking rules: Build your intranet outside your firewall | Tweet |
It's an established fact that intranets (or internal networks) grow and live within your organisation's firewall.
Or is it?
New approaches and technology are now challenging the concept that intranets must be stored within your organisation's direct structure.
For instance in Australian government there is Govdex. This wiki-based extranet system meets secret level Federal government provisions and is free for government users.
It doesn't stretch this system too far to consider it as suitable as an intranet platform for any small government agencies with no intranet budget.
As it is wiki-based it provides basic content management functionality, including a news tool and discussion board - which is more intranet functionality than most smaller agencies can claim now.
For example I've recently worked with another area to implement a secure Govdex wiki space as a micro intranet for a key community within my agency. This will expand into an extranet over time, but it functions now just like any other intranet platform.
Govdex isn't the only option on the horizon.
LinkedIn, a business networking site, is planning to release a series of work-related tools to support collaboration between staff members. These would sit in secure areas of LinkedIn, but on the intranet.
This was discussed in a recent New York Times article, At Social Site, Only the Businesslike Need Apply
One new product, Company Groups, automatically gathers all the employees from a company who use LinkedIn into a single, private Web forum. Employees can pose questions to each other, and share and discuss news articles about their industry.
Soon, LinkedIn plans to add additional features, like a group calendar, and let independent developers contribute their own programs that will allow employees to collaborate on projects.
The idea is to let firms exploit their employees’ social connections, institutional memories and special skills — knowledge that large, geographically dispersed companies often have a difficult time obtaining.
Behind LinkedIn, other start-ups are also entering this space, providing for significant innovation to best address organsational space needs.
This is very interesting news for anyone with a small budget and need for a significant intranet.
Rather than investing in building or buying a content management system, developing social tools or managing intranet hardware and software, simply use openly available software to facilitate it.
So what would it take to make you consider building your intranet outside the firewall?
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Effective use of PDFs in websites and intranets | Tweet |
My agency has historically provided documents within our website and intranet in three formats, HTML (web pages), RTF (Rich Text Format) and PDF. The rationale behind this has been to give customers choice.
It has also allowed us to look at relative usage over time to see which formats are most preferred by our customers and staff.
The ratio we see by visits roughly averages as follows:
100 HTML (webpages) : 12 PDF : 1 RTF
This does suggest there while, as you'd expect, most web users prefer to view web pages, there is a legitimate place in our website for PDF versions. (RTF we're considering dropping altogether.)
There are significant incremental costs involved in delivering documents in different formats.
This includes the issues in managing updating across the formats and, particularly for PDF, managing accessibility and effective searching.
This leads on to the core issue:
If we have a legitimate need to provide different formats of documents in our website and there is a cost to doing so, how do we maximise the effectiveness of the different formats in order to maximise our ROI?
Here's some steps that my agency has taken.
Firstly, looking at PDF-specific issues, many PDFs are not designed to be found easily in search engines. Where they are findable, the text provided in the PDF results is often gobble-de-gook.
This is easily fixed by setting a couple of properties in each PDF, well explained in the article Make your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines) in the Acrobat user group.
Accessibility can also become an issue. While PDFs are actually quite good for accessibility purposes, many are never optimised for accessibility either due to lack of knowledge or lack of time. Given that government has a legal obligation to deliver accessible websites this could be quite a large issue for some agencies when audited.
Adobe's PDF creator comes with the ability to test the accessibility of a PDF and suggest improvements. I use this regularly on PDFs and find that it's both effective and provides useful suggestions. If you are unsure of what you can do to address PDF accessibility, simply running this report can provide you with a handle on what needs to be done.
The PDF creator also comes with a system for metatagging images within PDF documents with alternative text and structuring the order in which headings and text blocks are read to help people who cannot read the words, such as those who are vision impaired.
The most recent versions of Adobe Acrobat reader also include a screen reader for the vision-impaired, and simply using this tool to listen to your documents while closing your eyes can give you a clearer insight into how accessible your PDFs really are.
Finally, in my opinion, PDFs are not a great format for online use. If you're on the web you expect to find web pages. PDF is a useful print alternative, but isn't really the format of choice for reading online. In my experience PDFs are primarily used when someone wants to print a document for later reference.
HTML web pages are quite simple and fast to update. However PDF (and RTF) require significantly more attention and, often, specialist designers or tools.
This adds cost and time but not always significant value, particularly when changes are quite small and non-critical.
There are approaches that can reduce the cost and time required - and avoid those situations when your PDFs and web pages do not match.
My agency is in the process of implementing a CSS-based replacement for printable PDF fact sheets. Basically we've developed a fact sheet print template for web pages which can be used to generate more effective PDF-like pages.
Another approach we are looking at for the future is to use PDF on the fly generators, which allow the delivery of any web content as a PDF at a click of a button.
The advantage of this approach is that an agency can continue to provide PDF versions, but without the effort and cost of developing them. Only the website's HTML version needs to be maintained as the PDF version is basically generated on request from your website users.
So findability, accessibility and more accurate and timely delivery are all achievable with PDFs with just a little thought. These lift the effectiveness of this format, helping our customers find and access the information.
Of course, most people will still prefer web pages, but if your agency is committed to offering PDF as an option - or the sole way to access documents - with some improvements to their effectiveness you'll be helping ensure that your customers get what they need.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
When good websites turn bad | Tweet |
I've had a keen interest in the Attorney General's Department for a number of years now.
That's not because they may - or may not - be the government department most likely to have James Bond, Triple X or the Men In Black working for them.
It's because they do a lot of important things across a range of areas, but rarely seem to get much credit for it.
For example, while their name suggests a dry, boring legal portfolio - and indeed they do have a large role in the intersection between Australia's legal system and government - they are also responsible for developing emergency management systems and supporting emergency management services, which become pretty important to people when there is an earthquake, flood or other disaster.
They also look after the Family Relationship Centres, which play an enormous role in supporting families around the country and manage Comlaw, THE source for legislative information in Australia and Australian Law Online, equally the source for legal and justice related information.
That's not to mention counter-terrorism, or engagement with the justice systems across the Pacific.
These are all important and useful activities and would make the AG's Department a very interesting place to work.
But what have they done to their website?
The other day I visited the main AG's website for the first time in awhile and was surprised at what I found.
I have my views on attractive and usable web design and they don't match what the AG's Department has done to their site.
The URL icon in the web address bar is cute - a scale of justice, much clearer than using a Commonwealth crest which suffers at a 16x16 pixel size. Unfortunately this was also the high point for me.
The site is coloured a very bright orange, fading through to blue with black highlights. The crest is nicely positioned at a good size at top left, but doesn't blend well with the page - it sits on a solid dark background and has harsh lines separating it from the rest of the design.
The website homepage has more than 70 visible links, organised into topic area throughout the left half two-thirds of the website - basically exposing much of the site navigation, using up most of the visible area to do it rather than neat dropdown menus.
It does have a right-hand column with several news items, Ministerial links and a couple of publications.
However that left hand area with all those links! It doesn't make the site very attractive or usable, it's simply overwhelming!
I did go to the site for a specific purpose, but after one look at the homepage, I fled back to Google and searched for the content instead - finding it within seconds.
I think that many other users similarly overwhelmed with options would react in a similar way.
So what mistake has AG's made - the concept that if links are good, more links are better?
That a home page, being largely a navigation page, should simple be a list of links?
Certainly that was the peak of user design back in the mid-90s, when Yahoo launched with a groundbreaking list of lists, neatly categorised by type. But I do not see any of today's popular sites taking a similar approach - perhaps the world has moved on.
I'm sure the department had good intentions for this design and was aiming to making it easier for the many audiences that visit the AG's site, for many different reasons.
However I do not think the approach selected will maximise the utility of the site - and look out for that 'bounce' rate!
Bounce rate (From Google Analytics' definition)
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Redesigning sites to put customers at the centre of the universe | Tweet |
From our latest usability review, my agency's customers are saying that our website is looking a bit old, tired and dated.
They say it is very "about us" focused, covered in agency news items screaming 'look at me!', rather than "about them" - the customers!
Certainly many of our news messages are important (to customers), but news isn't what draws our customers to the website, it is information they become aware of when they go there to use our tools.
In the current design news is positions front and centre - where people look for important content. However the tools and resources important to our customers are pushed to the fringes - the far right or the bottom of the site.
So we're listening to our customers and I've received a go-ahead to make some changes.
The scope is the homepage and overall site template - we're not touching the primary navigation or content throughout the site.
I have set four rules for my team:
- Put customer needs first
- Use less words
- Minimise disruption
- Lift the look
Use less words:
Our home page is currently text rich - we want to cut down the words to the essential information to help customers move deeper into the site.
Minimise disruption:
We don't want to make regular visitors work harder to find tools. Even if we make tools easier to reach, this can make it harder for regulars who are habitualised to finding specific tools in particular places. This particularly goes for our main navigation, search and secure site login - none of which we want to make harder to find.
We are prepared to cause some disruption - you cannot adjust an interface without affecting some people - but we want to keep it as minimal as possible while achieving the other goals of the work.
Progress so far....
So far our web designer has put a lot of time into understand how people use our site, using all our data sources, and even asking a few real people.
From his preliminary rough design, we've had a very productive collaboration session to develop a wireframe (pic below) of how the homepage should be structured, using input from our customer research and website stats.
I've also conducted some preliminary ad hoc user testing to verify that this is regarded as a better design (it is from my small sample).
We're now fleshing out the wireframe to develop an appropriate interface pallette based on our corporate colours and fit the words we have to have before getting the design into a formal review process.
All opinions welcome!
New homepage initial wireframe
Key features
- Crest at top left
- Top menu realigned to left
- Search untouched
- Left/bottom menus untouched
- Secure login unmoved but more visible
- Important tools centred, in logical groups
- Frequently used tools buttons at right
- News items below tools with less text
- Subscribe options besides news
Has eGovernment stalled at the half-way point? | Tweet |
Reading up on one of my favourite eGov blogs, In the Eye of the Storm, I found this post from February with some great slides and commentary on how far e-government has gone, but how little has changed in the last few years, e-government 3.0.
Edited 16/06: This article is further reinforced by this article in ITWeek, UK e-government fails to make the grade
Is this the same experience as we have in Australia?
It's now common to get information from government online, it's also common to transact with government online. However, can we interact with government online yet?
As in the UK, in Australia government appears to have been very slow about taking the next step - to actually converse with our customers online.
I'm happy to say that my agency is taking baby steps into interacting on forums, and we've talked about providing web-based text or voice chat to interact with customers, but are still some big steps away from this.
If the name of the game is customer service, and customers want to interact with government online (as AGIMO's latest eGovernment Satisfaction report is telling us) - why are we holding back?
Sunday, June 15, 2008
An intranet isn't an information management system, but it has a role to play | Tweet |
A dilemma we're dealing with in my agency is that many projects have placed their documentation within the intranet and, over time, this has become the authoritative source of the most current copy of some documents.
This means that the owners of the content are very sensitive towards any changes to the intranet's structure which might reduce access to their pages - despite having only small audiences - because if there's an ANAO audit the intranet is the repository of the master documents.
I discourage the use of the intranet in this manner as it does not (in its current version) meet the records management requirements of the National Archives. We don't have appropriate version control, documents cannot be locked, ownership is flexible and archiving, while appropriate for an intranet, isn't up to information management standards.
However our Knowledge Management strategy does features the intranet as a major plank as it is an important tool for storing information, and a primary tool for people to communicate information.
I have seen attempts in the past to co-opt an organisation's intranet and turn it into an information management system. In these cases the intranet was developed according to the standards for digital record keeping.
This worked very well - as an information management tool. However it was lousy at communicating information to staff and lost significant credibility (and usage) - essentially nullifying one of the most important communication tools in the organisation.
The last I heard the organisation has hived off the information management parts and is seeking to regrow a conventional intranet.
I can understand why an organisation might attempt to turn an intranet into an information management system.
Good intranets are used frequently by the majority of staff, they store records (pages and files) and they are in many cases relatively easy to author and edit.
Whereas many information management systems are developed like old-style terminal systems, use strange processes to collect metadata, require enormous amounts of time to add records and are not very good at making information easy to find - unless you know precisely what you are looking for.
I've used several in the past and their usability, accessibility, design, search tool and general processes did not impress me alongside the intranet content management systems available at the time.
I can only think of one good reason why this difference exists - because information management systems have to meet lots of information storage standards - an intranet system can ignore them and make things easier for authors and users.
So should your intranet be an information management system?
My view is that it shouldn't - it should focus on what intranets do best, communicate information relevant to staff, facilitate collaboration and support staff in performing job-related tasks through being a central gateway / repository of tools and services.
If possible your intranet should also have a social aspect to help build (an appropriate) organisational culture and build staff loyalty and commitment by helping them feel like family - all work and no play makes Jack/Jill look elsewhere for an enjoyable work experience.
However intranets do have their part to play within an information management strategy.
An intranet is one of the mediums in which information is stored, and is a great tool for spreading information to those who need it within an organisation.
It is also a gateway to tools - such as an information management system - and tight integration between the two helps ensure that teams more effectively collaborate and manage their information.
I recommend that organisations consider their intranet as a 'primer' to help their staff get into the practice of information management.
First get enough of your staff using your intranet to create, store and share information through making the intranet easy to access, easier to author and full of appropriate content and tools.
Then once your staff have gotten the hang of putting content and files into an online system, introduce them to the 'real' information management system, which (in an ideal situation) integrates with the intranet and is almost as easy to use.
This way you'll not only ensure that your intranet is doing its job, but that your information management system is as well.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Intranet pruning | Tweet |
My team, in association with our web of content editors, recently completed a major review of the content within our intranet.
This has dramatically improved the currency of information throughout the site, with over 90% of the content having been reviewed and updated within the last year, up from slightly over 60% before I took over the intranet.
The oldest content in the site now is less than two years old, and generally these are navigational pages where the links remain current and there's no content to update.
A complaint I've heard regularly in other organisations I've worked for is that the intranet was no use as the content was old and was never updated.
This, along with search issues, appear to the two of the largest complaints about most intranets (and as was pointed out at a recent conference I attended, if you improve them but don't promote the changes staff will not change their perceptions).
The content review, considering our intranet is now around 3,000 pages in size - took around six months in total as a background task for two people alongside other work.
We were helped enormously by the content owners across the agency, who understand the importance of our intranet to the agency's day-to-day functioning. My team has also put considerable effort into building this understanding, which helps underpin the intranet's value.
There were some pages which had lost their owners due to normal organisational attrition, and when we could not identify other owners with the help of business areas we took a 'slash and burn' approach - we gave the agency's business areas a month's notice and then removing unowned pages from the live intranet to see if anyone complained.
This worked fantastically well - where pages were important there were rapid complaints and a content owner stepped forward. Given that it only takes a few seconds to restore a page, there were no long-term impacts and we now know who owns all the content in the intranet for ongoing review.
This approach may not work for all organisations, however given the large changes we're implementing at the moment, it made sense to create a little pain to avoid much greater pain in the future.
Our ongoing reviews will now be substantially smaller and the approach has also been useful in further building the credibility of our intranet as we've promoted the updating widely within the organisation.
I'd be very interested in the experiences of other managers in maintaining information currency in their online properties.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
eGovernment in Australia is like a chocolate éclair | Tweet |
There is some exciting activity happening in the Australian eGovernment scene.
States such as Victoria, Queensland and WA have taken major steps to standardise their online approaches across departments. At local level South Australia has introduced a phenomenal content management system that allows every council to have a well structured website, providing access to the key services they offer while still supporting individuality and innovation.
However at a Federal level it appears to me that eGovernment activity is more patchy.
Certainly there are fantastic applications such as e-tax from the Australian Tax Office (ATO), and the 2007 eCensus from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
But across the Federal Government there is little consistency as to how websites and eGovernment applications are designed, built or managed. Standards for reporting to allow ready comparisons across government sites do not exist and there are few efficiencies in coding or content management across departments or even within agencies across websites and intranets.
AGIMO (the Australian Government Information Management Office) did some sterling work a few years ago to develop a set of Better Practice Checklists and Guides for Federal government sites, however these are not enforceable, aging and do little to 'rein in' Agencies who go their own way.
Personally I've spoken with AGIMO several times to get their position on email marketing, wikis, blogs and participation in stakeholder forums and social media - unfortunately there are no guidelines and little knowledge of what is actually occurring in these spaces across the Government sector.
On this basis, while eGovernment does have a firm outer later, full of chocolatey goodness, the core is simply mush.
There are a number of steps I have identified that would allow Australia's Federal Government to begin realising the efficiencies and benefits that could be delivered via the online channel.
These include:
- Auditing the online channel within all Government departments to gain an understanding of the websites/intranets/extranets they run, support or engage with, the (software) systems they use, the governance in place and their strategic plans for the channel.
- Establishing and maintaining a register of key people working in the online area (business and IT people) across Departments who can cross-fertilise and support agency initiatives.
- Establishing appropriate and standardised reporting metrics that can be audited by the ANAO and guarantee that senior management and ministerial staff are provided with the same type of information no matter which agency. This may also include standardising on a core set of web measurement technologies.
- Establish strong guidelines on appropriate governance across website, intranet and extranet management.
- Create guidelines for engagement via the online channel - approaches for using social media and two-way communications tools in an effective, responsible and governable manner.
- Create National and State panels of suppliers across key areas, such as content management, search technologies, web design, mobile web design, rich media development, email marketing, mobile marketing and similar online areas that any Agency can draw on.
- Establish national standards around interface design - as simple as whether to place 'OK' or 'Cancel' to the left, using the same term for 'Firstname' and as complex as is needed. Due to how Agencies are so tied to their existing 'standards' no matter how different it is from other Agencies', there needs to be muscle to enforce this, perhaps with the involvement of the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO).
- Negotiate Government-wide head-level agreements with key providers so that smaller Agencies can access the tools and services they need to develop their online channel at an appropriate cost and support level.
- Build a government-wide library of common tools, code and 'widgets' which Agencies can draw on and reuse within their own systems. If the ongoing management and development of these common tools is an issue I'm sure appropriate arrangements can be developed to allow Agencies to contribute what they can afford while still benefiting - after all we're all the same eGovernment and all the money comes from the same source.
- Establish National training standards for staff in the online area - both business and technical - to ensure that citizens receive a similar standard of service online, just as is expected from telephone or face-to-face services.
The situation isn't all gloom and doom (how gloomy can a chocolate éclair be) - there are some initiatives which have begun to address some of my goals above.
Govdex is a prime example, a centrally provided wiki system (using Confluence - my second favourite wiki system behind MediaWiki) that any Agency can use to facilitate engagement. I have implemented two wikis using the system and while it appears not all agencies 'play nice' as yet (it's hideously slow in our office), I have nothing but praise for the organisation supporting the application and for AGIMO's work in providing the service.
Another initiative is the AGOSP program, also from AGIMO - which will see Agencies be able to access a central forms system for citizen forms, as they can already do for business forms and aims to strengthen Australia.gov.au as the central point for online engagement with Government.
However from my perspective it appears that most Federal Agencies are siloed - each doing their own research, design, development, system selection, governance and ongoing management - taking few learnings from others and definitely not sharing experiences to any great extent.
Perhaps one day in the far future eGovernment in Australia will develop that extra hard gobstopper core - but for now, in my humble opinion, it remains an éclair.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Getting (web) content right! | Tweet |
Here's a great presentation from Donna Spencer (formerly Donna Maurer) discussing how to get content right.
http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/2008/web-directions-ux-getting-content-right
The key things she picks on are:
- The reader is important - you're not
- Really think about what the reader wants to know
- Write as you speak - with a real voice
- Use images as well as words - more people are visual than verbal
It's scary, it's difficult to get approved at times and it involves change.
But our customers would find out what they needed faster and with less confusion and frustration.
Friday, May 16, 2008
The four purposes of an Intranet | Tweet |
As always James from Step Two Designs is both thought provoking and slightly controversial in his down-to-earth approach in this presentation, The four purposes of an intranet.
- Content
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Activity
It comes with voiceover which makes it easy to follow.
