If you are planning your SharePoint 2010 upgrade and looking at redesigning the hundreds of intranet sites --- stop right there!   Don't redesign, rethink your corporate intranet. 

I spend a fair amount of time with clients discussing the redesign of their sites and in most cases I continue to hear the word "portal" mentioned.   When I think of portals, I jump into my time machine and go back a decade or so.  Portals are plain and generally have static web content with outdated information that is seldom accessed by employees.   Look at your intranet today and it's likely you'll see a SharePoint site with all kinds of links that's not very interactive or relevant to individuals.  Maybe you have top-down executive blog that is posted to once a quarter or once a month if you’re lucky.   If the corporate intranet page wasn't set as the employee home page in the browser, I wonder how many people would actually visit it?  .  Sound like your intranet?  So what's the point of upgrading to SharePoint 2010 if you're just going to migrate those plain boring sites you have today?

It’s time to break away from the traditional thinking of intranet "portals" and design a collaborative infrastructure around a complete “community model”.  What do I mean exactly?   If you compare a community to the traditional portal, you may think it’s just a matter of semantics.   However, the concept of a portal is a push relationship as someone is pushing content to you.  Communities are social, interactive, dynamic, and provide a context for individuals to subscribe, collaborate and contribute to.   Communities source information from the bottom up as well as the top down.  Communities have a pull relationship -- meaning the community pulls on users to contribute and users pull on the community to consume.  The fact is that every piece of content and every person in your organization is part of some community whether you realize it or not.  The largest and most open community is everyone in your organization and there are likely hundreds or thousands of sub-communities.   Communities also provide a degree of openness in your organization.  So if the information you wish to share has more defined security requirements, that’s when you manage it in a secure team site as opposed to a community.  

Now I know what you're thinking -- "we have to have a hierarchical intranet portal".   Really do you?  Do you need it to be hierarchical?   Sure you might need a directory for people or sites for easier navigation.  You also need enhanced search capabilities as most people would rather search than browse.   Just think about it -- is the public internet hierarchical?   Does Google or Facebook or LinkedIn have any hierarchy?   In comparison, you could look at Yahoo as a traditional portal -- static, boring, and a site people rarely view anymore.  And that’s why Yahoo has lost market share and relevance today. 

Let's face it -- for many of us Facebook is our "portal" on the public internet  and something we visit 1 or more times a day because it's social and relevant to us personally.  LinkedIn may be your “portal” into your professional life and network.   Do you really need a traditional hierarchy of intranet sites and portals?   Or is it more important to capture, share, and collaborate on information within the context of a community?    

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Submitted by Thomas Resing November 08, 2010 - 11:54 AM

Rich, this really seems in tune with my thinking on the why to think community versus portal. Yahoo is so 1997 compared to Facebook. I wonder How you implement this with you clients. My sites?

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Submitted by Rich Blank November 08, 2010 - 12:28 PM

is the challenge of course. it was harder in 2007-2008....and a little easier today as social media has quickly reached the mainstream. you really need buy-in of executives and decision makers and sell them on the concept of socializing everything within the intranet so they make it a top-down strategic priority. The "intranet portal" is just one big community for everyone in the organization to participate -- some of the information will be top-down and the goal is try to make as much as possible bottom-up.

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Submitted by Thomas Resing November 08, 2010 - 1:26 PM

I agree. If the organization leadership doesn't buy this vision, it won't work. So I guess there are two hows. How to sell the vision and how to execute. Do you have any good examples or references for either? I know that a lot of orgainzations are using the 2010 social features, but I haven't seen many sharing the results publicly yet.

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Submitted by Rich Blank November 09, 2010 - 3:32 PM

I gave a presentation on selling sharepoint earlier in the year. The thing with SharePoint is that there's no one size fits all "pitch". Selling SharePoint is a process that includes showing business value.

Execution is obviously what it's all about. And each organization implements SharePoint to fit their structure, culture, and business needs. One of the challenges with SharePoint is that 2007 is old now as it was designed probably 5 yrs or so ago. The out-of-box design Microsoft gave you was to put "intranet" sites over here, have a place for all corporate blogs, and a different place for wikis, and another place for teamsites, etc... So you have intranet.company.com and teamsites.company.com and blogs.company.com, etc....

What I often see is intranets that have become stale while teamsites are being used as an alternative to provide more of that community/collaborative feel. The point is that everyone understands projects and teams...it's how most work gets done in most organizations today. Teamsites provide a collaborative context. Communities provide a context that is more natural to us as well -- just on a larger scale than a team. While blogs are useful by themselves, blogs within the context of a community are much more relevant. (Besides blog functionality in SP is weak by itself).

You're going to implement the strategy the organization buys into. It's a tough sell to break top-down thinking. If I had a dollar for everytime I heard "but we need our hierarchical intranet portal". The fact is you don't...you need to allow people to collaborate, communicate, and organize information inside communities both inside and outside the organization. And you need to refer to your intranet as collection of communities because by definition communities are social while portals are just...well portals.

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Submitted by Thomas Resing November 10, 2010 - 9:57 AM

I like the theory you are building. I'm sure groups will move this way over time. It will be interesting to watch and participate in.

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What about Push?

Submitted by Chiedu Ozuzu June 28, 2011 - 12:47 PM

Rich, I'm in complete agreement with your social-collaborative approach to Intranets. But I wonder whether it applies in all enterprise contexts. I work for a very large retailer that has several different 'businesses,' and therefore, our employees have different ways of doing their jobs. In stores, for example, the average user of the intranet spends 25 to 45 minutes online per day. While there certainly can be improvements made to facilitate better online collaboration and connections, the core business problem in the stores environment (where consistent and efficient execution the goal) is around how to deliver consistent, accurate, and relevant push content (e.g., policies, best practices, news, training, etc.) to a very large audence. Whereas this may sound like boring Web 1.0 (and probably is), it is an accurate description of the business problem, for this very large segment of our user base. Curious your thoughts here.

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