Intranet for a Corporate

I am designing an intranet for the 3rd time, first was in college, second was @ previous employer and now @ my current employer. I am enjoying working on it now as I have to justify each and every step, back it up with research and screenshots.

So an intranet makes sense for companies who work on lot of projects where there are lot of people say even 10 projects running at a time with say around atleast 50 people working on it, which is 5 person per project. For knowledge based companies and for creative companies it becomes a bare necessity other wise they will be redoing a lot of there work again and again. Intranet for a educational institute especially those who impart technical or managerial training make much more sense because without they would be repeating the same cycle again and again. With the Intranet they would create a knowledge base of lot of students and help a student march much more faster in the road-map of acquiring more skills using richer resources.

There is no out of box intranet still available especially for educational institutes. Since the needs of every educational institute is the same, the solution will also be the same, hence I see yet another opportunity in making a cool project idea out of this blog post which is “Intranet for a Corporate”.

Lets have a look at some of the out of box Intranet solutions. They are:

• FLOSS – OpenAtrium (http://www.openatrium.com)
• SaS – BackPack (http://backpackit.com)
• Proprietary – Intranet Dashboard (http://idintranet.com)
• SaS/FLOSS/Proprietary – Cyn.in (http://cyn.in)

The one which has all possible features is Intranet Dashboard (ID), whereas the most KISSED (keep it simple and social) is BackPack. Features of ID are exactly what my company intranet demands. Some of them are which I could have not even thought of.

I have to do lot of research tomorrow and they after tomorrow and make prototypes based on the research. Its saturday & sunday still I have to go as I have to make a delivery on Monday.

I will share all my research findings here on Monday. So keep watching.

Book Review -::- Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

Don’t Make Me Think – I bought this book quite a time back, and also finished reading it very soon (It took me 2 days, the book says it should be read in max 3-4 hours).

I have made a small extract of 8 pages from the book to use as guidelines for all my projects.

It is a very very good book to start with as far as Usability and User Experience is concerned.

Steve Krug the author has an accompanying website at http://www.sensible.com/ , and he rightly puts it as Advanced Common Sense Home.

Cool book, cool price, cool thoughts……go fot it.