You have poured your soul into the intranet project. You can see your blood, sweat and tear stains on every page of the beautiful new site. You and the rest of the team have battled at every corner over the new functionality, improved design and better content – and now, it’s time to let it live!

After a straight 48hr weekend shift and a few last minute disasters the site is up and running – you just have to sit back and wait for the applause…

“Is that it?”

“I don’t like the colour’

“Where’s the weather widget gone?!”

“Why do you always go and change everything just as I had figured out how to use it!”

Last month, we published a list of up coming intranet events for June which judging from your feedback, many of you found useful. We’re now going to to continue this service via a constantly updated events page. If you’ve got an event that you’d like us to include on this page, let us know!

The intranetizen team regularly attend intranet events and will review them, on these pages, post event. We know that budgets can be tight, so hope this service will help you attend the right events in the coming months. Get in touch if you’d like the intranetizen team to attend your event.

More money? New colleagues? Change of scene? Change of manager? Whatever your reason for wanting a new role, you can be certain that your skills will be in demand. But with so many options open to you, what will your next career move be? In this post, we’ll look at the career paths open to intranet managers and ask you where you think you’ll head next.

Over a year after the UK government launched their campaign to encourage more people to work from home during the Olympics, London Mayor Boris Johnson has gone decidedly off-message. In a speech to Olympic workers last week, he derided home working during the games as a ‘skivers paradise’:

“We all know that is basically sitting wondering whether to go down to the fridge to hack off that bit of cheese before checking your emails again.”

His speech angered Transport for London – who’ve spent millions trying to persuade one-third of Londoners to work from home during the Olympics – and was widely criticised by intranet and digital workplace specialists. Boris isn’t alone, many other managers and Executives hold this view; working from home is like a holiday. But this view is slowly becoming the minority and more and more organisations are seeing the benefits of a digital workplace.

You received a call, or an email, or someone stopped by your desk (neatly ignoring the submission form you have on your intranet), asking you to create them a page or team/project site. And, they don’t just ask for a page, they demand it!  Disinterest may be an intranet manager’s biggest challenge, but over-enthusiastic demands run a close second.

Let’s not be too cynical; it’s great news that colleages see the intranet as important. You might also, for a brief moment, feel a small glimmer of hope that they really thought this through. In reality, your colleague (or, more likely, their manager) has decided they need a page and they need it NOW, but they don’t really know what they need it FOR.  As the intranet manager it is your role to ask the hard questions; to challenge their request. But, how do you go about this without squashing their enthusiasm?