The opening day of the IntraTeam Event 2010 (IE10) was full of interesting papers. The keynote was given by Jane McConnell with a virtuoso presentation based on the outcomes of the Global Intranet Trends report. It was indeed so good I failed to take notes, with Jane using music very effectively to underscore the way in which intranets have matured over the years. Following on from Jane was quite a challenge for Andrew Wright and Stephan Schillerwein talking about the some of the initial results from the World Intranet Challenge. This benchmark survey approach enables intranet managers to invite employees to complete a web-based survey form, and so give a user-perspective to complement the Global Intranet Trends report and the methodology used by the Intranet Benchmark Forum. However the presentation involved participation of some members of the audience for around 15 minutes to make a point that could have been better made in a couple of slides and a few minutes of presentation time. One of the companies that has recently used its survey results with great effect to gain senior management support for intranet investment was Arup, and an endorsement by a company of such a high reputation is a good indicator for a successful future for this survey.

The final paper before lunch was given by Rossen Rousev, the former Head of Business Intelligence at Shell, who described how the use of the Moreover Newsdesk press alerting service saved Shell around $15M in licence fees it had previously been paying to multiple local contractors worldwide. Some of the analytics that could be derived from the scanning were clearly of significant value to Shell.

After lunch I took the floor to present a view of what intranets should offer organisations in 2012, when hopefully business prospects were returning to some degree of normality. I tried to stress the importance of supporting mobile access to intranets, and of placing them in the context of an information management strategy. However it was not one of my better presentations, and could have done with some severe editing.

Suw Charman-Anderson followed me to give a view on how email could be replaced by social media applications. There were some good ideas here, but I felt Suw misjudged her audience, for example in describing what an RSS feed was, and also misjudged her timing so there was no time for questions. Eric Reiss brought the day to a close with a very accomplished presentation about social media inside the firewall which was both provocative and entertaining, though again there was no time for questions. I talked to Eric afterwards about something that I felt was missing from his presentation, and also that of Suw, and that was the impact of the regulatory environment on the use of social media. In Europe there is concern on the part of many companies, and especially Workers Councils, that there could be some serious data privacy concerns about what might be disclosed in social messaging, and in the USA there could be some equally serious e-discovery implications. Neither would prohibit social messaging but could have an impact on the scale and purpose of its use, and Eric supported my concerns.

Overall a very good first day, though I cannot speak for the Danish tracks which are a feature of this bi-lingual event. The organisation was, as always, excellent, and comments made last year by delegates had clearly been heard. For another view of the conference have a look at Michael Sampson's blog

Martin White