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.

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!

Worldwide Intranet challenge recently ran a poll on Linkedin asking the question “What is the one improvement to your intranet you would like to see in 2012?” Nearly 300 people responded, and the results make interesting reading, but as many commentators before us noted, this is a poll of what intranet professionals want. The 300 respondents are not representative of the average intranet user – they’re much more representative of people like us, and the answers they gave reflect that.

Here is some tough love. Your employees don’t want any of that stuff.

There comes a time when an intranet manager is faced with an intranet upgrade. Your intranet isn’t fit for purpose and the majority of your time is spent fixing things rather than developing and perfecting areas within. Does the thought of an upgrade excite you? Or make you break out in a fit of cold sweats? No matter what the reaction, an intranet upgrade is a big project that requires the right team internally and externally.

In a series of upcoming Intranetizen posts we will be looking at the different steps in achieving a successful intranet upgrade. This first post details the process behind securing an agency that understands your business and your project’s objectives.

Social intranets have been widely noted as the ‘next big thing’ in intranets, but many practioners, including us, have noted the obvious difficulty in reporting why social should be so central to our plans. Without tangible, believable return on investment numbers, it’s hard to justify why your intranet should go social. A gut feel, and a glutton of 2012 trend posts are rarely enough to convince CIOs and CFOs of the investment.