Networking

Managing an intranet can be a pretty lonely occupation – we’re often battling alone to make our intranets better. But there’s a thriving community of intranet pros who are happy to share their experiences. Here’s a few places to get started.

Twitter

All four of us get all our news from Twitter. Follow the #intranet hashtag for the latest industry news and blogs, as well as to connect with fellow intranet specialists. To make life a bit easier, we’ve created an Intranetizen twitter list with the key people that we think you should follow. There is a growing list of other hastags you may want to follow such as #esn and #dw.

Blogging

While intranets rarely get a mention in mainstream IT industry news sites, there’s an impressive range of intranet managers, consultants and researchers out there who regularly blog on all aspects of intranet management.

Here are a few of the blogs we religiously follow:

• Clearbox by Sam Marshall and team
• Column Two by James Robertson
• NetJMC by Jane McConnell
• Interact Intranet Blog by the Interact team
• Worldwide Intranet Challenge Blog by Andrew Wright
• Content Economy by Oscar Berg
• DRCC by Diana Railton
• Digital Workplace Group
• InfoArch by Samuel Driessen
• IntranetBlog by Toby Ward
• Intranet Connections by Carolyn Douglas
• Intranet Diary by Luke Oatham
• Intranet Directions by Steve Bynghall and Chris Tubb
• Intranet Experience by Sean Nicholson
• Kilobox Communiqué by Wedge Black
• My Digital Workplace by Ellen Van Aken

Conferences

Another sign of the increasing maturity of the industry is the emergence of dedicated conferences for intranet professionals. No longer are we expected to be happy with a couple of workshops within a broader web event; now there are events taking place all over the world, covering a wide range of intranet topics in their agenda.

Take a look at our constantly-updated intranet and digital workplace events page.

Others

If you can’t stretch to a conference, Digital Workplace Live,  the monthly online offering from the Digital Workplace Group, is excellent value. Using a WebEx meeting, and compered by DWG’s Paul Miller, this gives you a whistlestop tour though some of the world’s leading intranets. Fantastic for generating new ideas.

LinkedIn is a fantastic resource for intranet managers, with a burgeoning number of groups covering all aspects of intranet comms, collaboration, design, usability and governance.

Intranetizen’s top five LinkedIn groups:

• Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)
• Intranet Professionals
• Intranet 3.0
• Intranet Career Path
• Sharepoint Experts

We hope that’s inspired you to get out there and connect with – and learn from – others in the intranet industry. If you’ve got a favourite group, blog or event, let us know.

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