Social intranets, as part of a broader social enterprise strategy, are increasingly more commonplace and there are no shortage of technology suppliers ready to add the functionality to your portal. But as we’ve noted at intranetizen before, installing the technology is by far the easiest part of creating a social intranet — the hardest part is embedding that technology in the weave of workplace workflow and changing the culture of an organisation. We’ve proposed tactics to develop trust before, but here are some further steps you can take to make social work on your intranet and in your company.

Content owners are an integral part of any successful intranet. We won’t deny it nor will any of us can say we could manage an intranet without their input and involvement. These colleagues see the value of the intranet and try to take an active role while doing their day job. Let’s focus on that one small word; try. Your content owners will try but do they always deliver?

We’ve all heard the spiel about the digital workplace improving every corner of your business, transforming the way employees work. Intranets, we’re told, are a productivity engine, making everyone’s life a little easier. Yet despite this, intranets rarely get much attention from bigwigs. And when they do, it’s often negative.

One sure-fire way to get your execs to sit up and take notice is to win an award. Here the Intranetizen team offer five reasons to enter (and win) award schemes.

Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending and presenting at the intra.NET Reloaded event in Berlin. Subtitled “From broadcasting to collaboration”, the conference focused on the evolution of intranets from a publishing (and broadly internal communications owned-channel) into the social collaboration space that many companies are now launching. The event was very well attended, with strong representation from eBay, NASA, Wells Fargo, Pfizer, Dell and my own company.

In early March, I attended the London Designing intranets that work masterclass led by James Robertson (@s2d_jamesr) of Step Two Designs. If you haven’t already heard of James, read his blog or own one of his books, then you need to fix that immediately. James knows intranets, therefore you should know James.

I was looking forward to attending James’ masterclass because he promised an interactive day full of:

• design principles and concepts
• practical techniques, including card sorting, tree testing and usability testing
• pros and cons of the homepage design

Did he deliver on that promise? I think so. Ok, I am not saying James didn’t deliver what he had promised, nor am I saying I was disappointed in the masterclass. Actually it is the exact opposite, but I was disappointed in the debate. I wanted more from my fellow attendees!

It’s a common question, often asked, with no perfect answer: “What’s the right formation for my intranet team?”. The response will differ each time and is defined by many criteria, not least your budget, the size of the organisation and the skills available to you. Importantly, it’ll also depend if you’re planning a major overhaul of the site, or simply maintaining and existing site. Whilst most intranet teams wish they didn’t have an “intranet as a project” mentality, it’s an inevitability in many organisations.

In a series of  Intranetizen posts, we’ll explore the makeup of intranet teams. Today we’ll take a look at the format of a developmental intranet team, set up to redevelop an existing corporate intranet. You’ve hired the agency, now it’s time to get to work.

Search is one of the most useful features on an intranet – but it’s also one of the most complained-about.

A poor search function doesn’t just mean users can’t find the content they want; it reduces user confidence in the whole intranet. Pages of irrelevant, badly-titled results frustrate users, leading many to ask “why can’t this just be like Google?”

Google has spent the last twelve years – not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars – tweaking its search algorithm.  No one has these kinds of resources for enterprise search, but there are certainly a few things intranet managers can learn from Google.

Here Intranetizen gives our top ten tips for sorting out search.