Interesting Elsewhere: digital workplace, Salesforce, SharePoint and intranet task testing

The four Intranetizens like to read articles, books and blog posts on a variety of topics. For your delight — and failing that, an aide to your continued procrastination — here are a few articles that caught our eye this week.

Here’s what we read this week:

• Finding your digital stakeholders (and why you should bother to): Louise Kidney explains how to find your digital stakeholders, but more importantly perhaps, why you should bother to. This post also links to a guide as Louise points out, the guide isn’t exhaustive but is a good starting point for people venturing into this territory, possibly for the first time.
• Salesforce launches new social media software to fend off competition: An interesting piece of news that is important for any organisation that uses Chatter. SFDC will be putting out all the stops to keep their Chatter customers in the months to come – now that Microsoft bought Yammer.
• SharePoint survey results: Did you participate in a SharePoint survey five weeks ago? Interested in reading the results? Well, the SharePoint community has summarised them for you.
• How-to guide for intranet task testing: Ephraim Freed wrote a very detailed post on the benefits of task testing. Task testing fills a critical roll for which card sorting was not designed: it evaluates the findability of content. If you are committed to buildling a user-friendly navigation for your employees, intranet task testing plays an important role.
• A short history of intranets and what’s next with social, mobile and cloud: How many of us actually work on our organisation’s intranet but don’t actually know the history of how the intranet started? Inform your mind and read this post. Perfect for that intranet themed pub quiz you are planning.
• The not-so-secret life of  Intranet managers: Lexi Rodrigo asked the question (on LinkedIn), ‘As an intranet manager, what 3 tasks take up most of your time?’ There were some interesting responses that truly showed the diversity of an intranet manager’s responsibilities. In this post Lexi neatly summarises those darn task time suckers.
• Can Ethnography Save Enterprise Social Networking?: Mike Gotta from Cisco Systems, makes the case for bringing the human back into enterprise software design and development, starting out with enterprise social networking.

And what made us snort this week:

• iPhone 5 promo video: The better promo video that Apple should have used
• TfL, iOS6, Apple Maps and our very own Sharon O’Dea:  Upgraded to iOS6 and find your favourite spots are now missing on Apple Maps? It seems one TfL station had the solution for some London commuters. With the power of Twitter behind her and a very funny photo, Sharon was trending.