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.

Our 2012 prediction post sparked some healthy debate about the role of news on corporate intranets. A mainstay of intranets since day dot, news has no doubt occupied a significant proportion of your homepage real estate but the time has come to challenge that position. Is news dead-space, or does it justify its inclusion with ease. This week we invite Rachel Miller of AllThingsIC to guest blog with the Intranetizen team to discuss the role of intranet news.

Last week your intrepid bloggers, Luke and Sharon, jetted off to Copenhagen for a conference put on by Scandinavian intranet specialists IntraTeam. The IntraTeam Event, now in its fifth year, brought together intranet specialists from across Europe and further afield for three days of talks and workshops – not to mention a lot of meat and beer.

Does your intranet have a name? Is it an important branding feature or just lipstick on a pig? If you are developing your intranet, it’ll no doubt be a topic that you’re wrestling with right now. This post will look at the case for and against naming your intranet and provide some useful resources and ideas if that’s your preferred direction. We’re grateful to Paul Graville at Concentra UK for his help.