29.8.2022
Customizable tool links, improved search and people search functions – these features don´t come standard with the modern SharePoint Online intranet, but are all small customizations which took the intranet of Metsähallitus to a whole new level.
Continue reading “Case Metsähallitus: Small customizations ensured a better than expected intranet”
12.5.2022
A new era in workplace communication dawned for the people of Solita, when the new intranet, Insider, opened in March 2022. Insider is an intranet solution based on the Unily product, which was adjusted to meet Solita’s needs. In Finland, intranets made on existing products are rare, as Microsoft’s products are the preferred intranet tools. What is Insider like and why did Solita end up with the product, even though they have a lot of different tools and especially know-how in their organization?
Continue reading “Case Solita: Insider intranet was born on Unily platform”
8.3.2022
Intranet and search engine optimization (SEO) may not be thought of as things that are related to each other, but in reality, they are very much related. Intranets also need search engine optimization, but instead of optimizing for Google, we just talk about optimizing for the intranet’s internal search engine.
However, all search engines work with the same main principles as Google. Sure, Google has a much larger datapool when it evaluates different sites, but the basic principles of organizing and sorting search results are similar.
Content creators play a key role when it comes to a good intranet search experience. Even the best search engine doesn’t know how to return the right results, unless the content creators have considered the search engine in the content. Although this is the same principle that content creators follow with search engine optimization for Google, SEO is often not considered enough when it comes to intranets.
This article lists the three most important search engine optimization principles for intranet content writers.
Continue reading “Intranet Search Engine Optimization”
27.9.2021
The position of Microsoft’s M365 as a platform for Finnish intranets has only strengthened in recent years. The Covid-19 pandemic has exploded the use of Teams. In some organizations so much so that Teams has become a synonym for the word ‘intranet’. SharePoint communication sites are created in the M365 environment with only a few clicks. Hence, one can easily set up a small set of internal instructions, messages and tools.
Continue reading “Microsoft 365 intranet suppliers in Finland”
26.8.2021
In what direction is the intranet and digital work environment going? The world has been wrestling in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic for a year and a half and a large proportion of knowledge workers have been working more or less remotely during this time. Although the pandemic and remote work are not directly responsible for the development of the digital work environment, it has accelerated a change in both mindsets and practices. We picked five themes which can be seen in the current time.
Continue reading “Digital Work Environment Trends in 2021”
1.3.2021
All intranets are moving to the cloud, including multinational and multilingual organizations’ intranets. This shift to the cloud provides many benefits, but at the same time presents challenges. Often old solutions cannot be transferred to the cloud because of technical reasons. Uponor faced this challenge a year ago. As the technical reform loomed, Uponor decided to take the opportunity to rethink its entire intranet concept.
Continue reading “Case: Uponor’s new intranet brings the entire organization together”
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”
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”
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”
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”
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”
27.6.2017
Paulig Group is a family-owned, international enterprise in the food industry. Their portfolio includes strong brands such as Paulig, Santa Maria, Risenta, Gold&Green and Poco Loco. The Group has about 1,900 employees in 13 countries. They are working in four business divisions and common functions.
Paulig has grown via acquisitions and they wanted to redesign their intranet structure to support productivity and their internal Paulig Way culture development towards ‘one company with several brands’ better than before.
Continue reading “Case: Paulig – Bold new intranet implementation supports culture development”
Buyer's Guide to Intranet Projects 