Ask Not What You Can Do for Your Intranet...

The scene slowly began to fade and I was standing amidst a pile of discarded diskettes, network cabling, and other miscellaneous peripherals. I looked over the mass of computer gadgetry and saw a sea of filing cabinets and bookcases, each filled with thousands upon thousands of paper documents, stretching out as far as the eye could see. All of a sudden, from out of the shadows emerged a dark figure, "Build it and they will come..." it whispered.

"Oh great, not that tired old cliché," I thought to myself. You would think that a ghost from another plane of existence would have had more imagination. However, if a strange office phantom tells you to do something, you better do it. Otherwise, you may end up spitting pea soup all over the guy in the next office. So there I was the very next day plowing through the office and leaving an eerie crop circle in the middle of the department where all the filing cabinets and shelves used to stand. In its place, a single server stood humming in apparent satisfaction.

"There, this ought to do it!" I thought. I sat at my desk and basked in my accomplishment. However, my quiet and introspective soliloquy was interrupted by the voice of the apparition once again, "Go the distance..." it said this time.

"Oh man, are you kidding me with this stuff? Give me a break, will ya!?!?" I cried out in frustration. But once again, I did what the spirit asked me. I, along with all the department content owners, loaded up our happy little server with every bit of information relevant to the company since the death of disco.

I was hoping that that would be the end of it. But I knew better. All things come in threes. There were three bears, three stooges, three ghosts in "A Christmas Carol", and genies always granted you three wishes. That wasn't going to be the end of it.

I waited until the phantom appeared again, "Ease their pain..." Yup, there it was. At that very moment, I woke up in sweat-soaked sheets, unsure as to whether my dream was a prophetic vision or the result of a bad mixture of cough syrups taken in high dosage. Either way, I couldn't take the chance.

What pain?!?! Whose pain?!?! I would soon find out.

• Introduction
• The unflattering "BEFORE" picture
• The new and improved "AFTER" picture!
• Conclusion
  

Introduction

As time goes by, content rich sites will simply get bigger and bigger. A certain amount of maintenance is required to preserve the integrity of the site and prevent it from turning into one of those giant squid creatures that capsize sea vessels. An intranet is an ongoing process. There's no "end-point" to the project where you can comfortably hope that it will run itself. You have to follow-up on it, you have to maintain it, and you have to allow it to grow.

However, the word "maintenance" doesn't always have to mean "manual". You shouldn't have to chase your intranet around as though it were a 5-year old who was let loose in a store's toy department. You've invested thousands of dollars on your computer hardware; why not let it do the work?

Regardless of the content on your site, there will always be certain tasks that seem very repetitive and make you feel as though you were working in front of an assembly line. The good news is that "repetitive" can usually mean that you can automate the processes. Computers are great for repetition, human beings are not.

Some common activities on active Websites include:

• Posting information on the site
• Archiving old pages
• Sending "alert" notices to users about recent additions
• Verifying the site for broken links

The unflattering "BEFORE" picture

(The following program contains scenes of violence toward computer equipment, foul language, and extremely repetitive processes. Viewer discretion is advised. Although inspired by true-life events, names and identities were changed to protect the privacy of those involved.)

Allow me to give you a quick overview of the "BEFORE" picture with regards to how a certain, not-to-be-named company went about updating and maintaining the vast store of information contained within their intranet.

Every morning, the content providers and editors for each of the company's business units would sift through a barrage of data from various on- and offline sources. Once they gathered the information they wanted to post on the site for that day, they would need to:

It may not seem like much but can you imagine doing this every morning with over two-dozen articles? Beeeeeeeeep...CODE BLUE!!! CODE BLUE!!! Does the patient have a pulse?!?!?!

This intranet site was designed at a time when Website authoring tools were in their infancy. The framework of the site was developed by the IT department with the use of an HTML code editor. The content owners and editors, on the other hand, used a simple WYSIWYG editor to populate the site. They didn't have the luxury of using one of the newer suite of tools that are available on the market nowadays. Those that were available at the time added unwanted code to your pages and gave inconsistent results. By the time Web-authoring suites finally began bridging the gap between what you wanted and what it actually delivered, the site had grown to about 20,000 pages. Porting a site of this size to one of the Web-management suites was not an option.

Copyright © 2002 Competia Inc. All rights reserved. 

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