Intranet Focus

It was well worth spending a day in a 747 to attend the Step Two Designs Intranets2012 conference in Sydney on 16-17 May. This is the second time that James Robertson and his team have run the event, which like the Intrateam event in Denmark is based around the Step Two community of intranet managers, [...]

I was asked yesterday why we brought forward the Enterprise Search Europe conference to May 30/31 from its October timing last year. The answer is quite simple – there is so much new to discuss and yet old questions still need good answers.  The search landscape has changed significantly since October 2011, with major acquisitions [...]

The search business changes again. After HP/Autonomy, Oracle/Endeca and Lexmark/Isys-Search comes IBM/Vivisimo.  Vivisimo has been a bit of a slow burner, starting off in 2000 as a sort of search portal federating search results from other search applications and then using proprietary clustering algorithms developed at Carnegie-Mellon University to make sense of the results. Over [...]

Our latest Research Notes paper Managing Virtual Teams sets out the benefits and challenges of virtual teams, and focuses in particular on the management of virtual team meetings. It is based heavily on my own experience of managing virtual teams dating back to 1974 and comments from a workshop on virtual teams that I gave at [...]

Enterprise Search Europe 2012 (for which I am Conference Chair) takes place at the Hilton Olympia, London, on 30-31 May. Most conferences have a keynote speaker – we have three.  Paul Doscher (CEO Lucid Imagination) opens the conference by looking at the future of search with an open-source software perspective and at the end of [...]

In 2000 Jakob Nielsen suggested that a sample size of five was adequate for a web usability test. This has given much comfort to web and intranet managers struggling to find the time and resources to carry out usability tests. This ‘magic number’ was not seriously challenged until 2010 when Hwang and Salvendy published a paper [...]

Although there were many organisations exploring the potential of mobile access to information in 2011 the emphasis was on the use of smartphones. Most of the early adopters were in the IT industry, anxious to gain experience that would enable them to offer commercial solutions in 2012.  In the course of 2011 there were a [...]

Apple announced its iPad3 in San Francisco today in a press conference that seemed more mundane than in the Steve Jobs era.  The iPad3 is certainly not mundane, though it is virtually the same size as the iPad2. The most important visual change comes when it is switched on, as it has a screen resolution [...]

One of the paradoxes of the sector we work in is that enterprise search applications provide a way of finding information, and yet finding information on enterprise search applications is virtually impossible. Most of the vendors are either subsidiaries or divisions of larger companies, or are privately held and do not disclose basic financial information [...]

Yesterday 30 copies of Collaboration Roadmap arrived in the Intranet Focus office. This is Michael Sampson’s new book, and having a collection of most of the books ever written on collaboration I can confidently state that this is the definitive work. On 15 March Michael is running a Collaboration Masterclass at the Etc. venue in [...]