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Judging by the winners of Nielsen Norman Group's annual intranet design competition, intranets are starting to become more like the Internet as a whole, with increased use of multimedia, mobile access, and even a shopping cart in one instance.

The winning intranets for the 2006 Intranet Design Annual are:

• Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia
• ALTANA Pharma AG, Germany
• Bank of Ireland Group, Ireland
• Capital One, United States
• IBM, United States
• Merrill Lynch, United States
• METRO Group, Germany
• O₂, United Kingdom
• Staples, United States
• Vodafone, United Kingdom

Each company has a different dynamic to its intranet team as far as the size and support it receives. "There can be the problem of too many cooks in the broth, and that can make it harder at large companies," Coyne told Intranet Journal.

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At some large companies, the intranet team works alongside the team for the public Web site. In others, a rivalry might exist. But Web teams often have bigger budgets, and a smart intranet team might take advantage of usability studies and other research done by the Web team and apply it to the intranet.

Multimedia was more popular among the 2006 winners than in the past, led by Vodaphone's TV area that features a global team of correspondents. IBM's employee directory includes audio files with the proper pronunciation of employee names.

"The employee directory has really grown up. It used to just be a PDF file," said Coyne, who counts directories along with expanded human resources information and industry news as basic features of almost every intranet. IBM's cleverly named Blue Pages company directory was extensively re-designed, and was the subject of a great deal of usability testing during its development, Coyne said. In the end, IBM estimates the new Blue Pages design saves users 72 minutes each month.

IBM also stood out among this year's winners because of its embrace of blogging. "There's a lot of talk about blogging, but they aren't really doing it," Coyne said. Blogs are a natural fit for a tech company like IBM, but some winners are in industries like banking that aren't known to be cutting edge. There, blogging is seen more as a pastime than a way to get work done.

Despite the lack of intranet blogging, a place on the intranet for messages from CEOs or department heads remains common.

A larger industry trend evident among the winners is the lack of a consolidated content management industry. Forty percent of this year's winners built their own content management systems. Other popular technologies used by this year's winners were products from Apache, Autonomy, BEA, EMC-Documentum, IBM, Lotus, Lucene, Oracle, Verity, and Microsoft.

ALTANA borrowed some popular Web functionality by implementing a shopping cart for ordering supplies — mimicking the way employees shop online for themselves. O₂, with an intranet version stripped down for Blackberry use, and Vodafone, with a smartphone version, made the most of mobile technology.

With its 193 screenshots, the Nielsen Norman Intranet Design Annual may seem heavily focused on design, but that's not all that's involved in developing a quality intranet. Coyne said the report doesn't include a lot about the content because of the sensitive nature of corporate content, but the quality of the content is considered when judging the intranets.

"One of the huge parts of an intranet is usability and design," she said. "If you try to watch people use intranets, I really do think design and usability are important, but if you don't have content, it's not going to work."

The Intranet Design Annual runs 287 pages and costs $148. Site licenses for multiple copies cost $348. You can order the report or find more information at: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/.

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