Ideas for Using the Corporate Intranet Solution

This section includes some ideas to incorporate into the corporate intranet site solution with the elements previously discussed.

Disseminate important corporatewide information such as policy and procedure changes using announcements. Put an expiration date on the announcements. If users see the same ones day-in and day-out, they have a tendency to ignore them.

Use a general discussion for obtaining employee feedback on policies, procedures, events, and other items of interest to employees. Moderate the discussion; have the human resources department or legal department responsible for approving all items submitted to the discussion group to ensure they are appropriate. Maintain a separate discussion forum for noncompany-related items, such as employees selling candy for their child’s youth group. This type of discussion should not take up valuable home page space but provide a link to it from the home page. Surveys can also be used to get specific input on a topic.

Maintain a corporate events list in a calendar view to provide visual impact for upcoming events. Depending on the corporate climate, things such as birthdays and vacations can be maintained on the corporate calendar and company events and holidays.

Store company policies, procedures, and forms in shared document libraries for ease of maintenance and for accessibility. The department responsible for maintaining the documents should also be responsible for the publishing of documents (approve contents), and read access provided to other users.

Create content source groups for logical breakdown of content for searching to prevent an inordinate amount of time from being spent performing searches.

Using Active Directory as the basis for the company directory assists in keeping the SharePoint-viewed company directory synchronized with it. A customized view of the directory can be created that filters and displays only relevant columns of information.

Using an application such as Infopath 2010 or Infopath Forms Services, InfoPath forms can be created, filled out, and stored in document libraries for access and processing. Alerts can be set up in the library for people who need to process the documents so that when something is submitted, they are notified and can review the items. Approval processing can also be used to approve and reject the documents. This concept could be used for things such as expense reports and other workflow documents. For an end-to-end solution, application code can be developed to feed the data from the form documents into the appropriate external application (for example, the accounting system) for final processing.

Because there is generally a great deal of information on a corporate intranet, users should take advantage of the ability to create and customize their own personal site to include information they find useful. By using web parts that interface with Microsoft Outlook 2007/2010, the WSS personal site can become the primary user interface.