The basics have been mastered by many, but where to go next to increase productivity even further? You’ve built the interest, gained the adoption, now how do you maintain it ? How can you keep employees enthused and engaged ? And how do you build the trust so your employees instinctively think of their intranet as the vital business tool?

The answer is enhance your intranet’s intelligence.

1) Finding useful content without knowing it exists

Many intranets are large in terms of the content they hold. While all of it should be interesting if stumbled across, there will always be some content that is more important to a particular individual.

It can often be time consuming to keep up with everything on the intranet, so how do you find content if you don’t know it’s there?

To improve the experience of finding this relevant content, intelligent intranets make sure content finds the right people, saving time, effort and frustration.

Using the searching and viewing habits of a person, the intranet will have the data to determine keywords and terms that they look for and read about on a regular basis. The content being read and liked by people in that person’s network or department is also data that can be analysed. With this information, the intranet can then search content that it ‘knows’ the person hasn’t read to make intelligent suggestions for content they might find useful.

2) Answering FAQs – One version of the truth

Every organisation has questions that are asked – often the same questions over and over again. This can become a huge drain on the experts in the business who answer them.

Beyond a perfectly functional, business-oriented intranet that has a space for questions and answers, an intelligent intranet will solve another problem: who to ask the question to…

With a well populated profile, the intranet will know who has a particular expertise or interest, who has what job title, which person wrote a page or blog post and on what topic, as well as additional information about a person that sits on their profile.

With this information an intelligent intranet can look at the question being asked and make suggestions as to which people may be able to answer, as well as having the functionality to tell them if that person is online and available to answer the question quickly.

Once the expert has answered the question this too becomes part of the collection of online knowledge on which the question and answer feature can draw to present people with answers to their questions, saving time in the future.

3) Populating profiles – A gentle reminder

We all know how important a well populated profile is in terms of engagement and adoption, so help people to add to theirs. An intelligent intranet will suggest expertise they might want to include on their profile.

These suggestions, with an easy ‘one click add’ to their profile, makes employees feel like the intranet is more tailored to them and makes searching for people via their expertise a much richer experience.

Using the information about the last time someone updated their profile, an intelligent intranet will also advise employees that they might want to check and update their information after a certain amount of time. Helping to keep profile information fresh.

4) Endorsement suggestions

Along with encouraging the addition of Expertise to employee’s profiles there is the important step of endorsing that expertise.

Endorsing expertise gives those looking for the best people for a particular project or task a clear indication as to who may have more skills in which areas. This improves the expertise search and giving people a much quicker way of getting to the right people.

But how do you encourage people to endorse the expertise of those they know?

For an intelligent intranet this is as easy as looking at who is in a person’s department, network and the expertise a person has, and then automatically suggesting people whose expertise they may wish to endorse.

By suggesting expertise that someone can endorse, this vital tool is not left to flounder and it builds a collaborative culture, especially across multiple locations where colleagues may not have met.

5) ‘Followed’ because they are relevant and not just known

While the people in our department or location may well have similar interests, it is the people we have chosen specifically to follow who are more likely to bring to light content we might have missed or make a comment and add content that is pertinent to our working day.

Yet these people may not be those you have ever met, so how do we know they are there?

Using data on a people’s habits, the intranet can suggest people you might like to follow, based on matching expertise, department (across all locations), job title, keywords in profile bios, interests and blog content.

By presenting people with a quick easy way to follow people with similar roles and interests to themselves they can build up a network of relevant people effortlessly. This network can then be further used to make expertise and content suggestions of a project.

6) Search the smart way

Building the seeds of a good search experience has been covered again and again, with keywords and sensible titles etc. Yet search can still frustrate many users, the biggest issue being that rushed typing can lead to poor spelling. However, this is something an intelligent intranet search can overcome.

While having a spell check in place can help in some cases, it’s not enough on its own as the biggest problems are often caused by ‘industry specific’ terminology. Terms and acronyms that every organisation has, unique to the way they do business and that a spell check is very unlikely to cover. This can be especially trying for new users.

An intelligent intranet search will learn over time those words and terms as everything put into the search will be stored and analysed. This means when a word or term is misspelt in the future, an intelligent search of possible alternatives can be checked and presented to the user.

7) Suggesting content to promote

With all the effort that is put into ensuring the search brings back the most relevant results, it’s important, on occasion, that the search order be overruled in favour of what an organisation believes should answer a particular question.

For example, while there may be a lot of forum chatter about going on maternity leave, if someone puts ‘Maternity’ or ‘Maternity Leave’ into the search, it may be the company Maternity Policy that is deemed to be the first port of call.

Yet, what about the pages that people have gone to over and over again from the results of a particular search term? An intelligent intranet will store these searches and the pages that are selected first from it and automatically use this data to suggest when content should be promoted to users.

8) Automatically presenting content at its best

The importance of well-built, engaging and considered pages should never be underestimated. If your intranet fails to grab people’s attention, they won’t bother to come back.

There are lots of resources available for building interest into your intranet page, but what of those pages where the content has been uploaded, as, perhaps a PDF or Word document? What experience can a user expect? A title and a link to download the document? This is simply not engaging.

An intelligent intranet will recognise the type of file that’s been uploaded and automatically present it as an inline preview.

This intelligent feature will ensure that all the social tools built into the page, such as comments and content recommends is still part of the uploaded document and facilitates easier viewing of the content without the need to click and download.

9) Has important content changed?

For an intelligent intranet good quality, engaging content isn’t enough. Using the information stored about people’s habits, searches and activities, the system should advise people if content they have read recently has changed or if new content has been added.

This intelligence may take the role of suggesting areas of the intranet that people might like to subscribe to. A forum perhaps, that holds discussions that lots of people in a person’s network have liked or commented on. Or perhaps a blog where the post titles include words or terms the person has searched for frequently in the past.

Using this information to suggest subscription options to people is a huge benefit for them, as it takes the guesswork out of what they should be focusing on. It also ensures that they don’t miss trends in discussion where they would be interested and perhaps wish to ‘way-in’ on the conversation, encouraging collaboration and engagement.

10) Rewards/Gamification + Fun work = Increase productivity

The vital role peer-to-peer recognition plays in any organisation has been stated over and over in intranet literature. However, for the intelligent intranet, this is not the end of the story, as with intelligence comes the added ability to recognise achievement automatically.

While it is a simple first step to manually add ‘badges’ for achievement for gaining an internal award or passing a training course to a person’s profile, this small step can be taken much further.

Human beings are, for the most part, competitive by nature. The high popularity of online games, such as Candy Crush, give abundant evidence of our drive to aim higher, to out-do our own scores and the scores of others.

By using the habits and interactions of a person, an intelligent intranet knows when a person has contributed the most ‘liked’ posts to a particular forum, or given the most answers to questions that have been marked as the solution, or added the most pages with the most likes and comments.

Giving automatic recognition to behaviour the organisation believes to be valuable, highlights those who put in the effort and provides a benchmark against which others can aim.

The post 10 ways to increase productivity with an intelligent intranet appeared first on Interact software.

Interact’s Workflow and Forms application is very simple to use and so flexible almost any paper based process can be transformed into a slick, fully automated experience, to improve productivity across your business. Many of our customers have discovered the advantages to being able to build and report on their own online forms, here are some of the more common forms that are regularly created.

New Starters Form

Manage your new starter process from the moment you take on a new hire with a form that moves through the steps your company follows.

For example, moving from the person who made the hire, to the person who would send out the acceptance letter, HR and the IT department and then on to the new starter’s manager. You can control what information is included, making some information mandatory if it can’t be missed, or validated to reduce errors and even hidden from those without permission for fields such as bank account details.

Performance Review

Whether your performance reviews are done monthly, quarterly or yearly, building an online form for the process is simple. You can tailor the fields to suit your company’s needs.

This could be reflected in the criteria your appraise people on, the amount of information that needs to be included and the terminology that’s used.

Fields such as ‘drop-down lists’, ‘radio buttons’ and ‘dates’, ensure that the needs of your business are met in terms of the correct information being added and then reported on, making workflow and forms a huge benefit to senior management in their understanding of people’s overall progression.

Car Service Form

Fleet management can often be a labour and paper intensive set of processes. Bringing these processes into an online form has a lot of benefits. For example a ‘Service Request’ form will instantly record the details of the request, making a traceable workflow from the person making the request, giving them a way to find out what stage their request and subsequent service is at.

You can also direct the workflow using the options on the form.

In this example if the different service types were handled by different people or departments the forms flow rules could be set up to send the form to the relevant people depending on what option was selected by the user.

Story Submission

Some of our customers have struggled to get employees to engage with their intranet in the first instance. Learning to use a new technology can be overwhelming for some. To alleviate this initial stress many companies have a ‘Story Submission’ form which allows people to add the information they want to show on the intranet in the easiest way possible for the Marketing or Internal Communications team to add and make engaging.

They can aid people in their submission by using the database fields to pull through information from Interact Inranet (and other 3rd party systems) so that fields like name and department can be prepopulated for the person submitting the story, saving them time and reducing errors.

This form can then be sent to their manager for approval using the permissions on the form to specify where the approval page of the form should go.

Being able to specify a role, group or department within the rules means that when people change position within the company forms don’t have to be changed as long as the organisational structure and people’s profiles are kept up to date, future proofing your forms.

Workflow and Forms is so flexible that the possibilities are endless for how it can work for your business. Try today with a free Interact Intranet trial and explore this powerful app in greater detail.

The post Use your intranet to improve business productivity appeared first on Interact software.

Having cherry-picked my seven favourite features, let me show you how getting work done will be so much more effective with Interact 7.

Discussion Forums

Interact’s Discussion Forums have been, for many years, the centre of many peoples intranets and integral for a social intranet. The ability to have open conversation across the company about processes, best practice, customer service, policies and problems, (to name a few!) has proved invaluable. Never a company to rest on our laurels we have taken our discussion forums and added even more functionality into them.

It is now possible to separate out the forums content into Ideas, Discussions and Questions, (or use a mixture of these types) to specify what the forum is used for and of course, it is all fully searchable by the main site search. The layout has been modified in Interact 7, so users find it easier to find what they want. For example, there are colourful filters to ensure you have selected the thread type you want, if you are using more than one within the forum.

Exciting new functionality includes:

• Voting for ideas and questions, with the highest voted moving to the top of the thread.
• Interact Recommends showing at the top of the thread, encouraging people to read about the topic under discussion.
• Experts can be set, independently of the forums moderators, creating a rigorous process, giving people faith in the answers and information available through these forums.

All this great functionality means that it’s even easier for people to find the information they need, that their opinions and thoughts can be heard and acted upon, boosting morale and giving company culture a greater transparency. Great practice can be spread and questions answered on a topic in one, searchable place, aiding efficiency and helping people to get work done.

Version Control

In the past, Version Control within Interact CMS has been a powerful tool for those needing an integrated audit trail and rollback on important documents. It also came equipped with the ability to lock documents while a single person edited it, making documents compliant and control effortless.

Version Control, once only available for uploaded documents has taken a giant leap forward! It is now possible to apply version control to ‘Build Your Own’, HTML pages. With Interact 7 the choice of great looking, engaging content or version control is no longer an issue – you can have both.

All the great features of Version Control are still there, rollback is now only a single click, requesting feedback is a much more flexible process and checking out is simple.

This has a big impact on getting work done; the whole version control process is slicker, more intuitive and easier to use. Keeping track of different versions is a single click away and of course, all this great functionality can be applied to build your own pages providing more compelling content.

Drag and Drop

Drag and Drop functionality has been applied to the whole of Interact 7, making tasks quicker, easier and more intuitive. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Homepage Management!

The layout of homepage is now much more flexible, with people having the ability to drag and drop Interact 7’s awesome new widgets around the page, placing them there they want them.

You can simply click on the widget and drag it to where you want it to be. So easy that even more time can be given to planning what information you want to show on the homepage as opposed to how it’s going to look, because a great look and feel is guaranteed. Yet more ways Interact 7 can save you time and help get work done more efficiently.

It’s not only the homepages that have this new drag and drop functionality. The ability to drag files into Interact Intranet has been added to many key places such as:

• Profile timelines
• Attachments to documents
• Gallery Images

The ability to drag and drop images and files into the system makes the upload process quick, easy and stunningly intuitive.

The brilliant ‘upload preview’ box allows to you to check what you are uploading and upload many files and images at the same time.

Presence

Knowing if someone is active or not from within the intranet, will have a huge impact on the efficiency of any company. The Presence allow’s you to select if you are available therefore letting others know you are able to answer questions, respond to a forum or blog post, action a process or take a telephone call.

The red and green indicators appear all over the site, making finding available people even quicker, speeding up problem solving and helping people to get on with their work.

Endorsements and Expertise

The ability to add ‘Skills’ to people’s profiles has been a very popular feature of Interact in the past, especially as these skills can be used in the search to find the right person. With Interact 7, skills have evolved into Expertise, driving home there relevance in the work place.

Expertise is, of course, still searchable in the People Directory, but now there is the concept of Endorsements. People are able to click to say that they agree that someone has a particular expertise. This internal rating is invaluable when looking for people to join groups or teams. Having this knowledge upfront saves time and effort, while guiding people towards the best choices for their needs.

Interact Analytics

With Interact Analytics in Interact 7 the ‘grunt’ work of being an Intranet Manager is removed. Instead, the system builds up the relevant information and presents it in easy to understand lists and graphs, highlighting areas where attention is required. The reports are extensive, covering data such as usage stats, User Profile completeness, document quality and collaboration efforts; providing everything an Intranet Manager needs to run a vital and efficient intranet.

Built into the Analytics are various warnings to alert Intranet Managers if; they have documents with no keywords, documents with inactive authors, searches where information wasn’t found, documents due to expire, user profiles without images and many, many more.

Interact Analytics is the perfect tool for the dedicated Intranet Manager, reducing the pressure they have to prove that the intranet is performing well and enabling them to make immediate improvements to areas that need urgent attention.

Responsive Design

Without a doubt, one of the most amazing features of Interact 7 is our true responsive design. Responsive Design allows the intranet to automatically resize and realign itself perfectly across PC’s, tablets and smartphones, giving people true flexibility in how and where they use their intranet. Regardless of the technology it’s being viewed on, the intranet will always be packed with all the functionality people expect and rely on.

This jaw dropping functionality makes Interact 7 the only intranet in the world currently offering true responsive design. That means getting work done is simple and straight forward whether you’re a travelling sales person on a smart phone, warehouse worker on an iPad, a trainer on a laptop or an office based worker on their desk top computer.

The post 7 WOW features of Interact Intranet 7! appeared first on Interact software.

Yet sometimes, it can be very hard to keep up with the task.

Other parts of the job take priority so checking up on the intranet’s status becomes less frequent and when time finally comes around to chase up things; like document quality or searches that have not returned results, the task seem insurmountable.

Sometimes even the most diligent of intranet managers need help so that when the boss asks you that all-encompassing question, “How is the intranet performing at the moment?” you can quickly provide evidence supported statistics that not only identify how your intranet is performing but also show the behaviours of users to support how you should develop and lay out your intranet.

An intelligent analytical tool like Interact Analytics can provide intranet managers with many powerful, comprehensive reports that cover every aspect of intranet management. This information ensures intranet managers are equipped with all the statistics they need to maintain excellent quality documents, encourage and monitor collaboration, push profile completeness and eradicate any knowledge ‘black holes’.

Here are 10 ways you can easily track the success of your intranet:

1. Identify documents without keywords

We all know that exhaustive search results depend on documents that have well-chosen keywords attached to them, but how do you check that? Do you do a random spot check of documents? How many problem documents are you missing this way? Or do you make sure you check every new document that comes onto the intranet? That would be a full time job!

How much better would it be if your intranet told you which documents didn’t have keywords listed against them, so you could easily follow up?

No more searching randomly for keyword offenders, here they are listed right in front of you, no effort, simply chase up the authors (perhaps with the ‘Report an Error’ feature) and a potential black hole of information on your intranet is filled.

2. Find out which documents have inactive authors

Another hurdle intranet managers need to overcome is documents where the author is inactive, this equates to documents or information, on your intranet that nobody is responsible for. At best a document with no author is inconvenient, as alerts to review, comments and error reporting are ignored. At worst, this could cause a serious problem, by supplying people with out of date, inaccurate information. Thus eroding trust in your intranet, something it is very hard to rebuild once lost.

So how do you solve this? Go through every inactive user, check if there are documents under their name and then transfer ownership over one by one? A mountain of a task.

An easily accessible list that containing all of the documents with inactive users would provide intranet managers with the choice of going into the documents and changing the author over manually (if the original author has left the company) or using Interact’s ‘Author Change‘ functionality to change all of an author’s documents over to another more suitable author with one click of the mouse.

3. Document quality scores

As an intranet manager, document quality can become an obsession. You’ve given out governance, trained your authors, done extensive work shops, but how do you know they are following your carefully laid down rules about title and summary length, adding images, video and attachments as needed?

There is always the trusted spot check, but this could be a drop in the ocean to the number of documents being created.

A way of making this easy is an analytical tool that provides a document quality score based on best practice assumptions about what makes a good intranet document (i.e. length of title, summary, if images or videos are being used and several other criteria.)

Even more helpful would be the ability to ‘drill’ down into this information and view a particular author’s document quality as a whole, allowing you to offer easy and measurable means of coaching and monitoring a struggling author.

4. Find out what people can’t find on your intranet

People expect to be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily on the intranet, the harder you make them look for something, the less likely they are to try again. There is also the problem of people looking for information that simply doesn’t exist.

A ‘ailure to find‘ report should show the comments people have made about what information they were hoping to find and where they were hoping to find it.

While providing the intranet manager with the ability to keep track of the ‘failure to finds’ they have responded with an in-built to-do list.

5. Searches that have zero results

Searches with zero results show what people were looking for, that did not provide information, but which the user didn’t feel warranted a ‘’failure to find’ report to be created. It also shows how many ‘failure to finds’ are not being filled out, which could point to a training need; do people know they need to fill out a ‘failure to find’ report?

This report represents a short cut to knowing what information people are expecting to find on the intranet, allowing you to find people to add the relevant content.

6. Missing images on profile pages

Images of the people on your intranet are very important. They give a ‘human touch’ to communications and help to foster a strong sense of community. We respond far better to a smiling face and it can be especially useful for new staff.

Checking that everybody has an image attached to their profile can be a slow task of checking each profile in the people directory, but with Interact Analytics it’s a task that can be completed in two clicks of the mouse.

You are presented with a list, so you can click on all the people you want to remind to get their image added pronto and send them an automated reminder alert. So easy, yet it has such an impact on how your intranet is perceived.

7. Missing ‘About Me’ summary

The ‘About Me’ tab on the profile page is important for a lot of reasons. The information helps people to learn about each other, helping to create community and encourage communication and enterprise collaboration; it is also used to generate experts when using tools like Interact Answers – an incredibly useful tool in driving collaboration and capturing your companies intelligence. A very business orientate tool that can reduce time wasted answering questions and help to retain vital information.

Having given people guidance and governance on what you want added to their ‘About Me’ page how do you check they are doing it?

Consult Interact Analytics and it will tell you; like many of the ‘Profile Completeness’ reposts, it will even give you the option of sending a reminder alert to those who haven’t filled in their details yet.

8. Discover your top influencers

Who are your top contributors to your intranets collaboration? Who are the people on your intranet who communicate day in, day out? Who are the people whose comments are liked by others?

Knowing who these people are is vital information for an intranet manager, as these people are your intranet champions; they are those who are embracing the opportunity the intranet provides to engage with their colleagues.

You can use this list to find people that might be interested in writing a blog, content or who might be nurtured into a expert or an intranet champion capable of training others in how to get the most out of their brilliant tool.

9. What content do people ‘Like’

It’s a small little bit of functionality, surreptitiously added to nearly all the content on intranet, but don’t let its size fool you, a ‘Like’ option is mighty in what it represents.

Having a ‘Like’ function is an easy to use, positive, uncomplicated way that many people use when they start to collaborate. It doesn’t require thinking what they want to say, in the way a comment or post does, they don’t have to worry about how their contribution might be received, but it allows them to express an opinion, to show that they are interested and involved.

A ‘Like’ report will therefore show what content is enticing fledgling collaboration, and once collaboration is more established, what content is maintaining enterprise collaboration and as such is an important indicator as to how well collaboration is spreading.

It also serves the purpose of highlighting what sort of content people are finding helpful, well written and engaging, what sort of content they like. Is this content being predominantly written by a few people? Could you give these people more of a role within the running of the intranet?

This report will show you what’s working and useful on your intranet, aim to provide more of it if you can, use the natural talent of those who get a high number of ‘Likes’, use the information in conjunction with the influence score to find out who would be the best person to approach.

10. Benchmark your intranet against similar companies

Benchmarking lets intranet managers compare their key analytics against others in the same business sector. Interact Analytics has this built-in so that once activated there will be a simple way to see if your intranet needs immediate work.

No more fumbling around in the dark. No more wondering if what you consider a good ‘average document score’ or ‘active user login’ is actually as good as other peoples. You can not only measure your successes against your own internal benchmarking, but for the first time you can measure them against the external average, vital information for the intranet manager looking to create a truly awesome intranet.

Do you want to see what Interact Analytics could do for you? Request a demo today >>

The post 10 ways to track the success of your business intranet appeared first on Interact software.

It was actually a little overwhelming.

It took ages just to work your way around it and every day they had additions and variations that were impossible to keep up with.
The first couple of days I had blueberry pancakes, because the pancake stand was easy to find. On the third day the waiter who brought our tea, Henry, told me that they had blueberry muffins that morning, could he get me one?

Over the days that followed Henry would observe my breakfast choices and make suggestions on food I might like based on what I’d tried, offering to get the selection for me. It was great, it meant I got to try a wide range of what they had to offer, based on my own preferences and I felt like I never missed out on something I would have wanted. It also served to speed up breakfast quite a bit, which meant more time by the pool!

It was wonderful having Henry to make tailored suggestions, it meant i didn’t miss anything I would like, but I didn’t have to spend half the morning browsing for my choice and as his knowledge of my likes and dislikes increased, my confidence in his ability to make suggestions increased.

For many people their intranet can often feel like the enormous breakfast buffet. So much information, so many things that might be useful, nowhere near enough time to experience it all to find the most relevant content.

Interact’s Intelligent Store is like a ‘Henry’ for your intranet.

Interact’s Intelligence Store is made up of many different algorithms, that watch and record what users read and search for and how they engage with the intranet, absorbing their preferences and registering what they are interested in and information they need to do their job.

This ‘virtual Henry’ then uses the data to enhance people’s experience of the intranet by tailoring the information and suggestions it makes to their needs and wants. Ensuring that content really does intelligently find people without the inconvenience of having to expand time and effort looking for it.

Interact Suggests

Using the Interact Suggests Widget, the Intelligence Store makes relevant and useful suggestions to users, such as people they may like to follow, documents to read that are useful or interesting and forum posts that could have an impact.
The Interact Suggests widget is interactive, allowing a further filtering and ordering of information to suite people’s preferences.

As the system knows what people have already read, all the useful and relevant information that might have been missed is delivered directly to the right person.

No more feeling overwhelmed.

Having the important content people need delivered directly to them increases perceived intranet value, saves time and effort and enables people to get on with their day, happy in the knowledge they are not missing some tasty morsel of information (just as I nearly missed the ‘Pain au Chocolat’ one morning!)

Interact’s Sign Post Widget records people’s actions, usage of features and use of the intranet. This information is then used to let each person know about information that might be missing, or out of date in their profile. This information is critical to getting the most out of your intranet (and for providing Interact Answers, Interact’s crowd sourcing tool, with an accurate list of potential experts to respond to questions.)

The Sign Post Widget, taps into the Intelligence Store and offers people advice and tips for getting the most out of their intranet, by identifying useful features such as ‘@’ and ‘#’ tagging, that they may not have tried. Then providing not only details of how to use the feature but also the rationale as to why using the feature is a benefit, not just to them but the organisation as a whole.

As people try the features and update their profile, the information presented in the Signpost Widget is recorded, giving people an overall ‘completeness’ score. This score can be used to encourage gamification and involvement and as the ‘Profile Completeness Score’ has been introduced into the Statistics and Search Analytics – you can use this data when carrying out staff appraisals.

From generating a unique list of useful, tailored information every day, to advising people on how to improve their use of the intranet’s amazing tools and features, Interact’s Intelligence Store can make people more productive, efficient, engaged and involved.

So, just as a good breakfast does – intelligent suggestions on your intranet can really make your day.

If you would like a demo of the Intelligence Store within Interact Intranet – contact us>>

The post Why Intelligent Suggestions Can Make Your Day appeared first on Interact software.

Here are some ways you can encourage the positive interactions with your intranet that create a collaboration rich on-line environment. Some of these ideas cross over each other, or support each other, the idea being that if one suggestion didn’t work another similar one might. Not all these suggestions may be for you or your company culture, but some will be, try all that work, tweak them to fit your organisation, invent new ones, but most importantly try something and keep trying, it’s ultimately the only way to succeed with a social intranet.

Here are the first 24 tips for you to digest, if you would like the full list of 53 just let us know and we’ll send it through to you.

Get more tips on how to plan and deploy a successful intranet>>

1. Advertise lists of the most ‘liked’ content

Every time someone ‘likes’ a piece of content on your intranet you’re getting a small peak in positive collaboration. Encourage this, give people a list of the most liked content on your homepage, or within well visited content areas, with links for easy browsing. Help to merge those small peaks into a tidal wave.

2. Show the benefits

What do you hope enhanced collaboration will achieve? What are the business benefits for you? Have them clear in your mind and whenever these benefits are achieved then show everyone, advertise it, tell people that this is what they are aiming for. Showcase good collaboration; explain why the outcome was a business benefit. Such as helping sales – take this example: “We want to help you improve your win rate against competitor X. Can you share reasons for your losses on in the sales team area?”

3. Create Champions

Look for those who contribute a lot, not just documents, but comments; blogs, forum posts etc and harness that enthusiasm. Make these people champions, have them help you write or rewrite your intranet mission statement or charter, give ideas on how you can build collaboration in your specific environment, what problems do they think collaboration could solve? Impress on these people that by making them champions others will look to them for examples of good collaboration. Give them their own blogs; encourage them to talk about how they became collaboration champions, so that others can understand the sort of collaborative actions, commenting, posting on forums, answering questions etc that’s expected of them.

4. Advertise blogs

Do this on and off the intranet, for those who blog – include a link to their blog as part of their internal e-mail signature. On the intranet use bright, inviting and clickable adverts to direct people to the latest star blog.

5. Images can be content too

Sometimes the heaviest debate can be over images, be it the new company logo, a process flow chart, Venn diagram, KIP graph or circuit diagram. Think of the endless debate over the London 2012 Olympics mascot? Provide facilities for people to add images that matter to them and the option to comment. Make your images more than just supportive additions to text.

6. Reward good collaboration

One of the fastest ways to foster companywide collaboration is to encourage those who embrace it. Look at your stats, who contributes the most? Rewards could be given on an individual or departmental basis, based on the number of forum posts, comments or questions answered or more meaningfully, based on the quality of the comments or posts.

7. Shout about your successes

Sell your intranet, make it synonymous with ‘getting work done more efficiently’ by advertising your successes, however small these may be to being with. Who had their questions answered successfully? Which collaborative discussions lead to money saving, customer service improvements or better practice? Make this quantitative by setting up a homepage widget that promotes this – 5 problems solved, 3 new apps.

8. Have a great reward system

Nothing screams positive collaboration quite like people being given the opportunity to publicly thank those they work with. Not manager praise, but employee to employee thanks for help given, questions answered or good advice. This peer-to-peer recognition is invaluable in boosting company moral, encouraging strong business relationships and helping to grease the cogs of collaboration.

9. If you train them, they will come

Make collaboration training, such as @ and # tagging, commenting on documents, adding posts and answering questions, part of induction intranet training for all your new starters. Maybe set up a training area with tests using collaboration tools.

10. Share problems

This could be a straight forward question. For example: Can anyone suggest a better way of working out the office parking problems? Or something more business process related. Whatever it is empower your staff by asking them for solutions and ideas, perhaps by setting up a forum, or maybe adding the problem as a document and encouraging comments. Interact Answers is a great tool for this as it pushes questions to experts intelligently.

11. In our intranet we trust

In our intranet we trust. Trust is vital to collaboration. If you ask for feedback on a document, ensure the feedback given is seen to be acted upon. Get the author to give an update to their document, or advertise the result of using the feedback given. The more trust they have that the comments and feedback offered will be listened to and acted upon, the more people will be encouraged to collaborate.

12. Good statistics will lead you

Good statistics will lead you. Pay attention to your intranet stats that tell you who your top contributors are, who wrote the most viewed content, or whose document has the most comments and feed this information back to them. This can be extremely motivating and shows that others are aware of their efforts.

13. Encourage friendly rivalry

List the collaboration statistics, perhaps by department. Which department blogs the most, contributes to forums the most, answers the most questions, adds or comments on the most documents? Give praise or small rewards for getting to the top of these lists.

14. Actively encourage non-contributors

Check your statistics. Who’s not contributing? Could they benefit from a few lessons, or mentoring from an intranet champion? Is it a specific set of people? Non-contributors are contributors waiting to happen, sometimes all it needs is a little guidance to get them going.

15. Embrace Questions

No matter how difficult to answer, honestly asked questions are an important part of good collaboration. Don’t stifle or delete them, this will just cripple the trust people have in their intranet and cause resentment. Instead have the question answered by the most appropriately place senior member of staff.

16. Ask experts to blog

There are those in every business who are the experts, the knowledge holders, the experienced. Ask these people to blog about to what they do, day-to-day. They might want to do it weekly, monthly or even quarterly. Give them a few ideas to get them started. For example: A day in the life of the Production Foreman. Not everyone will say yes, encourage those who do to support and help each other.

17. Ideas forum

Create a business benefit driven ideas forum. Where users can express ideas on how customer service can be improved, processes made more efficient and time saved. Review these ideas regularly, ensure senior management is seen to respond every so often. But give people time to come up with ideas and promote a problem a week or month – this is the key!

18. Make sharing knowledge acceptable

In some companies collaboration is seen with distrust as those who have the knowledge think they need it to keep control of their position. Making knowledge sharing acceptable starts with people being willing to answer questions. This can be encouraged by monitoring people who answer the most questions correctly. With Interact Intranet we have Interact Answers, which automatically logs the people that answer the most questions correctly. Use this information to flatter a few egos. It’s great to be considered the expert for a department, how much better would it be to be the top expert in the whole company? Build up a little friendly rivalry. Don’t forget to publicly praise and reward those who provide the most correct answers.

19. Promote new profiles

Ensure new staff fill in their profile page as part of their induction and then promote that profile; employees will be more familiar with the people they work with, which in turn leads to better communication and ultimately improved collaboration. As it’s more intuitive to us as human beings to have discussion and idea sharing with people we know a little something about.

20. Have content worth collaborating on

Check your statistics. How much of your content has high ratings? How much of your content has high ‘like’ scores against it. How much of your content is relevant and up-to-date? Valuable, useful, interesting content is MUCH more likely to get people collaborating, as they will have first wanted to read it. If your statistics show poor, un-read content, start by retraining your authors.

21. Advertise blogs from teams

Give teams the ability to publicly log their progress, even if you are not going to give people access to all their content. Then promote these blogs in a high profile place. This will keep people apprised of what their colleagues are doing, providing information for cross departmental discussion. For example: Marketing blog that they are creating the new posters for a convention next month. Someone in sales reads about this and suggests they might want to try the company they used a few months ago for printing leaflets, as the printers had offered a 10% discount if they used them again before the end of the year and they did a really good job. There’s some really business benefit collaboration.

22. Ask for feedback

If you allow comments on documents, make sure you mention in that document that comments are welcomed. Don’t assume people will comment on a document – give them reasons to comment such as – we regularly update this policy – if you have any ideas let us know below.

23. Offer collaboration tips

Advertise your collaboration drive on your homepage by offering tips to users to help them get into the swing of it. For example:

• ‘If you’re leaving a comment, how about trying @Tagging? – a simple way to link to other content on the intranet’
• ‘Reading a document you think your colleague would like?, try sharing it with them’
• ‘Tell your colleagues if you find something valuable – make it your mission to give one piece of feedback today.’
• ‘What are you working on today? Updated your status and let people know. It may help others and reduce duplication of effort.’

24. Don’t give up

Even small collaboration attempts such as ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ a document are better than nothing, especially in the beginning. Keep trying, try as many of these 53 points as it takes. Adapt them to your needs, add new ones, if you come up with any good ones I’d love to hear about them.

Get more tips on how to plan and deploy a successful intranet >>

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However, it also gives me the chance to be at the top of something, (cue trumpet blowing), in this case the expert list on our company Intranet…

The impact of this ‘gamification’ should not be underestimated as I will explain later in this blog.

So what is Interact Answers?

Watch our the video of it in action here:

In short it’s an easy to use, easy to manage, intelligent, organisational information storage and retrieval feature. It allows your users to ask questions of your company’s collective intelligence, i.e. the Intranet and each other. Using the custom Interact Answers Widget, (or a button on their profile page activity feed) people are able to type in their questions and relevant keywords.

Interact then does some intelligent searches, using both the keywords and the keywords it identifies in the question, narrowing down the results from information it finds on the Intranet. This short list of results is then presented. If the person asking the questions doesn’t feel any of the results answers their questions, they are given the option to ask ‘experts’. The list of experts is created by the system from information held in the About Me, Skills and Interest tabs on their profile page. This list can be edited, so you can remove the CEO if it seems inappropriate to contact them and additional experts can be added if there is anyone it seems the system might have missed off.

These ‘experts’ are notified by an alert that there is a question they may be able to help with. They don’t have to answer it, but if they feel they can, they click on the alert and it will take them to the question, so they can add their response. The initiator of the question can then select the response that best answers the question and mark it as the accepted solution.

This question, with its accepted solution, now becomes part of the searchable knowledge for the company.

The Benefits of Interact Answers

Tapping Collective Intelligence

I am continually astounded by what can be achieved when a group of people put their heads together and at its bottom line that’s what Interact Answers is, a group of people with individual knowledge and experience focusing to solve the same problem. Something we’ve found using Interact Answers for ourselves is that many of the questions asked have initiated vigorous discussion, broadening understanding of the problem or topic. Using Interact Answers on Interact Extra – our extranet, has really opened our eyes to some of the brilliant solutions and ideas people have about the product and how it can be used and improved.

Retaining Company Knowledge

Another huge benefit is ‘retention of knowledge’. We no longer live in a world where a job is for life and the ‘old-timer’ trains the apprentice to take over from them. Job roles are fluid. Yet now, more than ever, we need information to do our jobs proficiently, often detailed and experienced based information. Interact Answers collects and stores this information. Taking it out of e-mail inboxes and making it available for everyone. Knowledge that will stay with the organisation, for the use of all, long after the person who answered the question may have left.

Saving Time and Effort

How much quicker and easier would it be to train a new starter if the questions they were likely to ask had already been answered? How much strain would it take off departments like HR and IT support if the basic problems others had experienced could be searched and viewed by everyone? Interact Answers provides a valuable time saving medium.Something else we’ve noticed through our own use of Interact Answers is that many of our questions come from people who are not based in the office. Giving our widely disbursed workforce a powerful resource for getting their questions answered.

How to Get Interact Answers Running

Here are some ideas to help you make Interact Answers a huge success:

1. Do some set up. Before you turn interact answers on for everyone, ask each department to submit their most frequently asked questions and add them, giving them accepted solutions. Having a few questions for people to find in the beginning may help a lot in gaining people’s trust and give them any idea of what they can expect from this new feature.
2. Tell people what it is. Sounds silly, but don’t just turn it on and leave it. A few people may find it by mistake, but most won’t. Give the ‘go-live’ some build up. Make sure everyone has filled in their skills, interests and about me tabs, make sure they know why this is important. Make it a big deal, but tailor people’s expectations, so they understand that Interact Answers will grow over time, that not all the answers will be available straight away, encourage them to see building up Interact Answers as a positive thing that will help them do their job, easier and more efficiently. Give real-life scenarios of how you expect Interact Answers to provide this assistant.
3. ‘Big Up’ the importance of being an Interact Expert, you might what to offer an end of year prize to the person highest on the Expert list. Or perhaps those who give the most useful answers. Play into the whole ‘gamification’ concept. Encourage the ‘gaming’ nature of people. In the long run this will bring more people to your Intranet and help increase the knowledge held in Interact Answers. Seeing their name at the top of a leader board is a powerful motivator for many people, take advantage of that, people are more likely to get involved if it not only helps them with their job, but it’s also fun.

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Preparing for this was a mammoth job, requiring people with unique skills from across the company. Marketing, sales, training, pre-sales, company IT, admin, client services and the finance departments were all involved. Several people who work predominantly out of the office were playing key roles, it was a daunting organisation challenge; but we had an ace up our sleeves.

We had the brilliant new Interact Teams module to help us.

This new module creates an environment within your intranet software that facilitates a much more effective team, project or committee working across companies, breaking down silos, making it easy for people to work together regardless of location, geographical location or time zone.

How does Interact Teams work?
Anyone can be given the permission to create a Team and take control of that Team area as a Team Owner, creating a great sense of ownership and increasing participation. There is, of course, an administrator permission for the module, so that overall control of all teams created can be maintained.

Creating the Team is very simple, the biggest choice being what sort of Team you want to create, there are three types:

Open – A Team anyone can search for and join without additional approval. For example a companywide ‘Best Practice’ team.
Private – A team that anyone can search for and request to join, with approval being given by the Team owner. These could be project teams, committees or company sports teams.
Hidden – This team can only be seen and searched for by those who are members. People can’t ask to join, they are invited to join, or simply added as members by the Team Owner. This higher level of discretion could be used for a company merger team or internal reorganisation team.

These different types mean that Teams can have a myriad of uses.

Once the new Team details have been selected, the really clever stuff happens. Interact takes the Team information and creates a team content area, automatically populating it, not only with Interact Intranet’s great collaboration features selected, like Blogs, Discussion Boards and Calendars, but also adding Team widgets to the Teams homepage to highlight these features.

New widgets are added automatically to the homepage that have been specifically created for teams, widgets that give information on the Team, it’s members and most importantly a brand new Teams Activity Feed widget.

This Activity Feed Widget is the collaborative centre of any Team and gives Team members an up-to-the-minute breakdown of documents, gallery images, blog posts, forum posts and calendar events added, as well as acting as a way of sending messages to the whole team.

Interact Intranet literally creates the Team area for the Team Owner. If the Team Owner wishes to add left hand navigation or adjust their Team homepage then this functionality is available. However, they could also simply start using the Team area immediately with no further action needed. Making Interact Teams so intuitive to use no additional training is required.

Guidance on the best use of the features offered and tips on how to get started is included within the structure of the new Team area providing everything a new Team Owner needs to get their team off to a great start.

What are the benefits?

As we discovered when using Interact Teams to help us plan Interaction 2011, just some of the benefits were improved communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Member Control

By creating a ‘Private’ team the Team Owner could ensure that the team members required were included in the planning, without the need for overly structured face-to-face meeting time.

Everything in One Place

Using our Team area as a central repository area for the documents and resources needed meant it was far easier to find the information required both in the office and out of it. Documents such as guest speaker power point presentations. Adding documents through the Activity Feed made the process quick and easy, allowing us to concentrate on the planning of the event rather than the structure or organisation of the team.

Broadcast

The ‘Broadcast’ button on the Activity Feed means sending all team members important alerts of delevopments or advising them of approaching deadlines was a very simple two click process.

Blogging

We were able to use the Team blog to publish updates and make them public, so we could share progress with the whole company, keeping everybody updated with our progress.

Discussion

The Team Forums were invaluable. We discussed many subjects including award designs, room layouts, menu’s and poster designs,which meant that people who might not have been in the office or working during regular office hours could give the project the benefit of their experience and ideas.

View

The Image Gallery was a huge benefit to us as maps and hotel room plans were being heavily discussed. Pictures taken of the venue and the layout of the conference rooms were always at our finger tips to be commented on and referred back to.

The post Interact Teams – the smarter way to work together on your intranet appeared first on Interact software.

Setting the Scene:

For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of one of the possibly many, people who work for you.

We’ll call her Becky.

Becky has been working for your organisation for many years. Her appraisals all say she’s good at her job, conscientious and knowledgably.

Yet what Becky’s appraisals don’t show is the extra mile she will go for her colleagues and for the organisation. Becky is always there to offer support, always the first to help a new member of staff to settle in and while she’s quiet, she is trusted by colleagues to know the answer or take extra work on if needed.

Becky is a huge asset; but her managers don’t know this as she is quiet, efficient and not someone to advertise her efforts.

News flash: Your organisation is FULL of people just like Becky.

The Problems

1. How do you recognise people like Becky?
2. How do you ensure that the people in your organisation, like Becky, feel valued and appreciated?
3. What business benefit does recognising these people bring?

The Answers
The answer to the first two questions is simple, take the onus of recognition away from middle and upper management and place it where it belongs, in the hands of your staff.  Empower people to thank and reward colleagues they believe make their work life easier.

The answer to the third question should be self-evident. People have more control over their working environment, are able to express their gratitude to those they work with, fostering a solid sense of community and goodwill in any environment. This in turn has a profoundly positive effect on moral and motivation, increasing productivity and retention rates.

These results can all be achieved easily with Interact Rewards.

Using Interact Rewards is as simple as saying ‘Thank You’. Anyone can do it and everyone should.

There are several set up choices with Interact Rewards so you can best reflect your company ethos.

• Everyone gets points they can give and these points can be redeemed for pre-determined prizes.
• Everyone gets points they can give and these points accumulate over the year and the person with the most points annually is your ‘Employee of the Year’.
• There are no points and everyone is just able to thank each other on an open manner.

Interact Rewards Provides:

• Powerful peer to peer recognition.
• A way to monitor the effort people give above and beyond their job.
• A very compelling reason for people to visit the Intranet.
• A powerful motivator.

Find out more about Interact Intranet and request a personal tour today

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