P.G. Daly's Intranet Talk:
A Sure-Fire Way to Drive Traffic to the Intranet

After my last column, people asked me about other big success stories from my Intranet, so I thought I'd share another "real big one" with you. One of the most sure-fire ways of driving traffic to your site is putting something employees absolutely need on the site and making that the only way they can get it. Sound simple? It can be (at least sometimes).

I work at my company's headquarters, which is also the headquarters for the parent company's North America operations. As you might imagine, a lot of meetings take place at this location in the half dozen or so formal conference rooms on campus. As you might also guess, these conference rooms are not in close proximity to one another and are never near enough to your office or cubicle when you need to schedule one. In the past, in order to schedule one, you had to either physically walk to the conference room location to see if it was available for the date and time you needed and/or call an administrative assistant that sat near the conference room to do it for you. At the very least it was an inconvenience to you and even worse, could be a major distraction and source of interruption to an administrative assistant's day as they got call upon call.

So, drum roll…, in walks the bright idea of scheduling all the conference rooms on the Intranet and making that the only and official way of scheduling a room. Once again, I used the Sitescape Forums (http://www.sitescape.com) for this task. I set up one central summit to house all the different calendars (a summit is basically another way of saying home page, entry-page, top-level, etc., for a set of related forums). Within this summit there is 1 calendar for each of the conference rooms which allows registered users (employees can register themselves) to add, edit, and delete appointments. Anyone with access to the Intranet, whether a registered user or not, can view the calendars. In addition to the individual room calendars, I set up several combined calendars that are basically a read-only view of multiple calendars. This allows a user to get a quick glance at room availability across the entire campus or a given building for a particular date and time rather than clicking in and out of specific rooms.

I approached the task of migrating the scheduling to the Intranet one conference room at a time. After entering all current appointments from the manual calendar, the manual calendar was removed from the bulletin board, wall, etc. and a sign indicating its scheduling was now done online (and how to access it) was put up in its place. Initially, of course, there was some resistance as users didn't want to change their behaviors (mostly those "not-so-happy we have to use PC's type people"). However, as time progressed and more and more rooms got online, the response became more positive and the administrative assistants were extremely grateful.

The calendaring feature of Sitescape is not quite as robust as its discussion and document sharing features (not in version 4.1 at least, although the latest version looks much richer), so I did purchase several customizations from the vendor (which will persist with future upgrades). These customizations included a calendar audit log to quell complaints from several users that someone had sabotaged them and deleted appointments they had made (turns out these users deleted their own appointments, but that is a different story…) and an overlapping/conflicting appointment edit check. Both these customizations were able to eliminate 99.999% of the small number of complaints I was receiving.

Everyone from the Chairman to the entry-level new hire needs to attend and hold meetings. Forcing all conference room scheduling to be completed on the Intranet with a user friendly interface gave me one of the bigger boosts in user activity that I've experienced in the 2 + years since the Intranet was introduced. And who knows, maybe they will even surf around and view other content a little before or after they book a room!

As always, comments and feedback are appreciated. You can e-mail me at paulag@enter.net.

The Author

P.G. Daly is Webmaster for the intranet of a large durable goods manufacturing company. In addition, P.G. writes for several online publications and does freelance web design and consulting. P.G. welcomes your feedback at paulag@enter.net .

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The Author