The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills intranet supports around 2000 staff. The new intranet started to roll out in the first week of May, alongside a department-wide IT upgrade. More staff will see the new intranet on their desktop over the next week or so.
Author: Luke Oatham
I recently posted my comparison of search results across 2 similar intranets. In this post, I use the same set of 21 search phrases to test the GovIntranet predictive search feature on the recently released Northern Ireland Office intranet. Some of the search tasks are not really applicable to this department but I have included them for completeness.
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Do intranets need an archive machine?
We’ve all used the UK Government Web Archive by The National Archives. It’s a great way of viewing a snapshot of a website at a particular moment in time. I’ve used it myself for compiling screenshots of a site’s redesign history.
Do we need something similar on our intranets? Is there a case for going back to a snapshot of the intranet at a particular date? I think there is. And it usually boils down to legal reasons where evidence is required to settle a dispute or clarify information.
As part of the latest release of the intranet theme, we’ve integrated a set of customised Staff Directory templates.
“But where are my downloads?” cried the website manager upon looking at her Google Analytics reports.
“They’re under Events,” replied the support guy.
“Oh,” said the confused manager. “…What’s an event?”