Buyer’s Guide to Intranet Projects
Our blog provides market information and customer case stories about intranets and digital workplaces in the Nordics.
The blog is maintained by North Patrol, a digital communications and business consulting company based in Helsinki, Finland.
Planning a website, an intranet, an extranet or e-commerce? If you are in doubt where to start from, just ask us!
11.8.2020
The University of Oulu was tired of the fact that the staff instructions and services could not be found in the content structure of their communications intranet. The solution was to design, user test, and implement a new staff intranet with an easy-to-use service directory.
Continue reading “Case: The service directory plays a key role for the staff intranet of the University of Oulu”
6.8.2020
Ramirent, one of Europe’s largest machine rental companies, relaunched its intranet during the Covid-19 pandemic and major internal changes. Simultaneously, new communication and collaboration tools were introduced. Renewing the digital work environment is always a major task, and on top of that, Ramirent had some extra challenges. Nevertheless, the new intranet was successfully launched on schedule in early May.
Continue reading “Case: Ramirent’s Intranet – triumph over adversity”
25.6.2020
We conducted a survey about digital work environments, which surprisingly showed how much WhatsApp is used for work communication. A staggering 37% of the 111 organizations who took part in the survey mentioned WhatsApp as one of the tools for information management and teamwork in their organizations. In previous years, WhatsApp has not even been mentioned as a major work communication tool. Although the question was not asked as directly in the past, almost 40% is still a noticeable result.
Continue reading “37% of large organizations use WhatsApp – and that’s a problem”
24.4.2020
Intranets have been a hot topic for universities recently. When the technical platforms of intranets come to the end of their life cycle, it’s time to reassess the whole concept. This was done by The University of Helsinki with their Liferay Intranet which we wrote about earlier.
Where the University of Helsinki decided to differentiate between the intranets of employees and students, the Swedish-language Åbo Akademi University, situated in Turku and Vaasa, took a different approach. Åbo Akademi University’s new intranet is for both staff and students, and it was implemented on Finland’s most popular intranet platform, O365.
Continue reading “Case: Åbo Akademi implemented a bilingual intranet with O365”
5.3.2020
2017 was a year of change for the University of Helsinki. The University was undergoing a big organizational change and at the same time a new student platform was taken into use. The intranet called Flamma was a joint intranet for both staff and students. Now, some of its content would be transferred to the new student platform called My Studies, giving an opportunity to reorganize the content of the intranet. In addition, the technical platform was coming to the end of its life cycle and adding the fact that the intranet was not responsive, a renewal was more than called for.
Continue reading “Case: The new intranet of the University of Helsinki is a result of close-knit collaboration”
27.2.2019
What does intranets and digital workspaces look like in Finland in 2018? We conducted a survey, in order to find out roles, functionalities and technologies of the digital workplace as well as to see how organizations develop and lead their intranets and digital workplaces.
Continue reading “Survey results: The roles and functions of digital workplaces in Finland”
12.11.2018
Caverion designs, produces and maintains technical solutions in real estate and manufacturing. Their renewed intranet was launched in March 2018. The renewal sought to create a tool that would support daily work and enable concurrent communication throughout the organisation, regardless of language version or job title. The renewal and changes in content production were introduced on time and within the budget, thanks to strong ownership and leadership in the project. Here is what Anne Kotila, Digital Communications Manager, who was in charge of the project, and Päivi Alakuijala, Chief of Communication and Marketing at Caverion, have to say about the successful renewal.
Continue reading “Case: Caverion’s new intranet is an efficient tool for everyday communication”
What does a proper intranet solution look like for an international company with 1,800 employees, sales in over 30 countries and production in 7 countries? That was the question at Peikko Group that wanted to improve internal communication across the company by renewing their intranet. Peikko did not have a modern intranet or digital workplace encompassing the entire organisation, allowing the company to start from scratch. Continue reading “Case: Peikko Group created several intranets from scratch”
5.11.2018
A year has passed since the launch of the City of Tampere’s new employee intranet. Let’s find out how the new intranet called Tasku (Pocket) has been received by the users. Communication manager Aila Rajamäki states that the users have had a positive experience with the new system. “The feedback on the content and usability has been primarily positive”, Rajamäki states.
Intranet projects for large cities are massive considering the number of users alone, and Tasku, for example, has approximately 15,000 users. Large projects also often involve several organisations and people and the time scale is long, requiring the work to be carried out at stages.
Continue reading “Case: intranet for the employees of the City of Tampere”
Organisations assign different tasks and roles to their Intranet. Over the past few years, the addition of features that enable knowledge-intensive work and interaction have caused many of the originally mass-communication focused intranets to transform into versatile digital workplaces.
Currently, there are basically two types of intranet: the communicational intranet and the digital workplace.
In addition, the popularity of using enterprise social networking (ESN) software as a tool for shared learning and coordination of work is growing.
Continue reading “What are digital workplace, intranet and ESN anyway? This is how I define them”
In addition to the technical requirements specification document, the content plan document is used to support the intranet implementation project. The plan can be also called content concept plan or content structure plan.
Continue reading “Content plan for an intranet – What does it include?”
Intranet is a service which essentially exists due to the information it contains. However, not all information is relevant for every user group. On the other hand, some of this information is relevant for everyone – oftentimes it is even “pushed” in front of everybody’s eyes. Then again, some of the content is utilized actively every day – and some of it only once a year. Moreover, keeping the content up to date should be super-easy.
Challenging requirements for intranet concept planning? Three-function framework for intranet content strategy provides a helpful tool for content planning and managing the explicit organizational information inside an intranet – or a digital workplace.
Continue reading “Content planning best practices for intranets and digital workplaces”
Web Service Award has just published their yearly “Trend report – How are the Swedish intranets doing?” study for the tenth time. The study covers 274 responses from intranet managers in Sweden and brings out for example quality issues and intranet development plans.
As concluded in my previous post, there are many alternatives for building a communicative intranet. However, when we take a closer look at document-centric teamwork solutions, it seems as if O365 has won the game already. For instance, in the article written by the online security firm Bitglass a couple of years ago, it is mentioned that Office 365 had already overtaken Google Apps when comparing enterprise adoption of cloud applications. And they certainly have kept up the pace in the past years. So, are the other alternatives even worth considering? Sure they are. Continue reading “Are there any teamwork solution alternatives for Office 365?”
Here in Finland, we have seen venerable marketing efforts by Microsoft and its partners for quite some time already, and the results are clearly visible in intranet project request for proposals responses. At times it feels like companies have purchased Office 365 licenses first, and only then started thinking about the fun things that could be done with them. Sure enough, O365 tools are perfectly fine for a lot of things, but it is recommended to take a closer look at the other alternatives as well before deciding on the technology platform. Continue reading “Are there any alternatives for Office 365 intranet?”
24.10.2017
There are still excellent chances to get prepared for next year’s intranet, ESN, or digital workplace development or redesign. We picked up some tips on conferences in Europe. The following conferences will give you inspiration, ideas, hot new knowledge on the topics, as well as great colleagues to network with.
Continue reading “Intranet, ESN, and digital workplace conferences this fall”
12.10.2017
Citycon is the shopping centre industry leader in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Citycon owns 50 urban, grocery-anchored shopping centres in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and Denmark. In addition, Citycon leases and manages 13 shopping centres in Norway on behalf of other owners, and owns two other retail properties. They have 250 employees in five countries, total asset value of 5 billion euros, and market capitalisation of 2 billion euros.
Redesigning Citycon’s intranet had been on the radar for quite a while already. The old intranet, based on SharePoint 2007, surely served its purpose of distributing common policies and instructions, but it was neither social nor visual.
Continue reading “Case: Citycon – Yammer cleared the way for new communicative culture and made business visible”
6.9.2017
Lately there has been a lot of talk about the competetiveness of the Finnish economy. One thing is for sure: in the intranet market we aren’t doing badly at all! Two Finnish products designed for intranet and digital work – Valo and Universe – are churning out outstanding sales figures around the world. In the spirit of our centenary year of independence, we decided to introduce these two top export products.
We interviewed representatives from both Universe and Valo, giving them the freedom to praise their own products as they see fit, but we also asked them to evaluate the competition and describe their product development philosophy. So, in this article we shall focus on Valo.
Continue reading “Finnish intranet products are conquering the world – introducing Valo”
Buyer's Guide to Intranet Projects 