In February, we offered up some tough love with our post describing 14 horrible features that we’d all seen on intranets over the years. It became a confessional with practitioners globally admitting the error of their ways, whilst others defended their use of weather widgets, timezone clocks and “click here” links.

Some actions can never be defended. Never.

In volume two, we offer up further intranet horrors that some intranet managers call features and we call signs you’ve lost the plot. Use this watershed to confess all. Do you do any of these?

So you’re sponsoring the Intranet project? Good work – you have an opportunity to really make a difference to an under-utilised and potentially hugely valuable tool that is already used by most of the company on a daily basis.

But what’s that? You have heard about an unwritten code for intranet project sponsors? That being obstructive, dis-engaged and difficult is ‘bang on trend’? You want to join the fast growing club of sponsors of failed projects?

You are in luck. Here are our top tips.

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.

Time for some more intranet tough love this week as we take a look at those intranet features you should really avoid. If any of these ideas genuinely came up in your intranet user research, please take a LONG HARD LOOK AT YOUR COLLEAGUES and consider leaving. If you’ve put them in your scope documents, hang your heads in shame!

Intranet Management can be a lonely occupation. Even in larger organisations, there’s rarely more than one or two people with Intranets as their sole responsibility, while in smaller companies it falls to internal comms or someone in the web team.

If you need others to learn from, bounce ideas off and share your intranet woe, you need to get out and about and network with your fellow intranet pros. By connecting with contemporaries, you can keep up to speed with developments in the tech world,  sneak a peek at intranets elsewhere (and nick all their best ideas), and find the occasional shoulder to cry on.

Here’s some ideas to get you started:

One of the positive innovations in this years Digital Workplace Survey are the inclusion of some company demographic questions, designed to allow some detailed research of how digital communication and collaboration tools are used in a range of organisations. Like many companies, not all of my employees are desk-based knowledge workers. Indeed, many are not supplied company laptops or mobile phones and as such have irregular access to intranet based information and services.

Given that your internal communication team, your HR team and a suite of other functions rely on employees having consistent, regular access to the intranet, it’s time to think beyond the laptop and explore new ways to reach deskless workers with your content and functions. You must find ways to bring the intranet to them – to fit it into their day-to-day routines — rather than expect them to break out to get to an office to read your global news. Extending the reach of the intranet, beyond the laptop, will help maximise its effectiveness.