Here at Intranetizen, we’ve talked about the need to measure the impact and performance of your intranet.  While success isn’t measured by page visitors, its hard to meet any of your goals if nobody come to the intranet in the first place.

In this special guest post for Intranetizen, William Amurgis - former director of internal communications at American Electric Power - sets out how you can boost traffic to your intranet by focussing on access, relevance and timeliness.

Beleaguered internet firm Yahoo! surprised many on Friday when it announced an end to working from home in the company.

In a memo widely leaked by disgruntled employees, Yahoo!’s Head of HR Jackie Reses explained:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

A lot of companies are still in their phase for experimenting with what is called enterprise 2.0 or social business. For some this means to establish web 2.0 inspired tools such as blogs, wikis or unified communication solutions. For the others the approach leads to the roll-out of social software solutions that mimick popular internet services such as Twitter and Facebook. In this guest blog for Intranetizen, Philipp Rosenthal argues organisations that ignore the eminent change in business IT frequently face the reality that employees start “outsourcing” their work environment to public cloud services – simply following the basic principle of “if there’s a will, there will be a way”.

If you want something to work properly in an organisation, you give someone responsibility for it. You don’t leave it to chance and simply hope that it gets done. Companies would never dream of not having someone in charge of legal, or communications, or widget production, so why is it that so many organisations are leaving enterprise collaboration inappropriately managed?

Maybe you’ve got a new boss determined to make their mark or you’ve got an intranet platform that was coded by Noah? Whatever the reason, at some point in your intranet career, you’re bound to be involved in a big intranet re-launch. Towards the end of the project, when you’re all exhausted, creativity diminished and you’re considering alternative careers, you’ll no doubt decide on your launch strategy. To help you on the way, here are some ideas tried, tested (or at the very least, collected) by the Intranetizen team.

As the use of social tools in the enterprise has exploded over recent years, the role of community management is being talked about more and more. Yet confusion remains about exactly what it is, and whether it’s really needed. Social media purists argue authentic online communities should be as completely self-organised and un-managed as possible. Others take a more pragmatic approach, suggesting effective facilitation and management helps the community to develop so that it meets its intended purpose.

In this special guest post for Intranetizen, Sam Woods, Community Manager for a global financial company’s social intranet sets out what makes community management work.