Corporate Intranet Information Architecture – a Publishing Site

There have been several occasions in my consulting career where I have discussed what a corporate intranet should look like.  There are several aspects to this question, branding, custom web parts or other bells and whistles, but I believe that the fundamental structure or information architecture is one of if not the most important aspect of a solid, useful corporate intranet.
Clearly, each individual company will have a unique look and feel and information architecture.  This will depend on the underlying business as well as the relative size, geographical locations and languages of the company.
However, I have noticed certain commonalities across companies and have started to develop a template of how I can help an organization visualize there corporate intranet.  This could be used as a target to reorganize an existing intranet or as a template to stand up a new one.  In either case, changes will have to be made to suit the individual company’s needs.  Most companies will have some or most of the following departments that can be organized into sub sites or site collections depending on the size of the organization.
  • Information Technology
  • Finance
  • Treasury or Accounting
  • Operations
  • Sales
  • Security
  • Risk Management
  • Procurement
  • Health and Safety
Below is a sample diagram I created depicting how one might illustrate this to a potential client.

 
 
 

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 26, 2016 at 6:32 PM

    Good idea! You have covered almost all the important aspects/areas of one company. One other thing you can add in an architecture company intranet are the completed projects with its final product image. It would be of sense if you place a gallery for that in your intranet. Agree? Here is a guide to help you: http://www.simpplr.com/blogs/2015/11/what-makes-a-21st-century-intranet/.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Metastorm - Open form in an action from a list or link

Below is the SQL underneath the custom list with the link to open an action.  If you are opening from outside of a Metastorm client, you may need to add the ‘SessionID’ parameter containing a valid session ID 9.  I haven’t tried this with the current 9.1 SSO, it may be unnecessary.   If the session id parameter is still necessary, usually we write a wrapper aspx page to authenticate to user, grab the session id and redirect them to the action. The syntax is http://<servername/Metastorm/eForm.aspx?Map=<process map name>&Action=<action name>&Folder=<folder name>&FolderID=<folderid>&Service=<BPM Service Name>&Client=External&FolderLaunchURL=&FolderCancelURL=&IsFolderAction=True SELECT eFolder . eFolderID , eFolder . eFolderName , eFolder . eStageName ,   eFolder . eUpdated , eFolder . eSubject , ITProjectInitiation . txtProjectName ,   CASE       WHEN LEN ( ITProjectInitiation . txtNextAction ) > 1          
Read more

No Search Results in SharePoint Contextual Search OSSSearchResults.aspx

This is another one for me so I never have to figure this out again.   All the other posts I found when looking into this talked about how to set up a search center and redirect people over there.   That is pretty well documented at this point, but the problem I had was that people were trying to search the local site, being direct to the out of the box _layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx page and getting no results.   The fix was frustratingly simple, check your alternate access mappings.   If you have extended the web app and users are using the new AAM then that could be the reason that the OOTB search results are not working.   In my case I had the short name as the default, and the FQDN as the custom, I switched them and now everything works.
Read more