Mambo Powered Intranet voted 'best of the best'

Written by David Hastie

Mar 02, 2005 at 02:00 PM

Mambo Powered Intranet voted 'best of the best'

Congratulations to the Integer Group's Intranet redesign team for being voted as one of the Top Ten Best Intranet list 2005, by Nielsen Norman Group.

"Designing an engaging Intranet for creative people can be challenge. Designers at The Integer Group met this challenge using dynamic homepage content to encourage daily use. They also conducted extensive paper prototyping and other usability testing to hone navigation and overall usability, ensuring that users can actually fine and use the features they need." - Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group.

From left to right: Sarah Herold, Tim Bock, Anne Mitchell, Jill Kliger Saliba (seated) and Christiaan van Woudenberg.

Designing a company intranet is one thing. Designing an award-winning intranet however is a completely different kettle of fish.

The Integer Group®, one of America's leading promotional marketing agencies, has been recognized as having one of the world's best intranets for 2005 by Nielsen Norman Group. Held annually, the award acknowledges the ten best intranets submitted from arou nd the globe.

Judged on ease of usability and the ability to cater to its users' needs, Nielsen Norman Group singled out Integer's originality and light-hearted approach. "Although that specific tone might not fit as well in more staid organizations, the general idea of highlighting personality and illustrating corporate culture by example definitely translates,"the authors of the 2005 Design Annual said. The Integer Group's intranet has elaborate online videos, stimulating graphics, and innovative copy to guide users to the many resources available.

Kara Pernice Coyne, Nielsen Norman Group director of research, identified creativity and accessibility as key components that defined an award-winning intranet. "Our winners are the best of the best intranets. They stood out because it's clear they put resources into identifying features that help all of their employees be more productive,"Coyne said. "And then they present the features creatively and with an eye always on usability and accessibility, whether for employees with disabilities or for those who work outside the office environment.â€?

An elongated history of acquisitions was behind Integer's push to redesign the company's intranet. Originally a Denver-based promotional marketing company, the agency acquired a Dallas office in 1996 to serve Texas-based clients, and by 2000 had added three more agencies. A Denver-based corporate office was formed in 2000 to manage the five-agency network. "The corporate office's first communication initiative was creating an intranet to serve as a single source of information and to promote a sense of the agencies as one entity,"said Anne Mitchell, The Integer Group's Director of Knowledge Management. Despite the introduction of the corporate intranet in 2000, the Midwest agency's 100 employees continued developing their own intranet. In a move to unify the company's intranets, the Knowledge Management team began work on a single intranet for all company employees, effectively merging the two existing intranets.

Integer's ultimate goal was to standardise all five agencies on a single, new intranet. "The corporate goal was to incorporate the contents and functions of both intranets without degrading the user experience at any agency,"said Sarah Herold, The Integer Group's Director of Corporate Communications. Launched in October 2004 and taking ten months to complete, the intranet's redesign was an instant success, with daily use up 86%. "The result is a very user-friendly site that is excelling in its objective as a central company-communications tool,"Mitchell said. Nielsen Norman Group obviously agreed.

But it is not just accolades that The Integer Group has reaped from the redesign of its intranet. "The winning companies saved between $200 and $1,000 annually per employee by improving their intranets. If all companies designed equally good intranets, the annual gains would be at least $22 billion in the United States alone, or about $100 billion added to the world economy,"said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, emphasising the financial benefits companies can reap from a cleverly designed intranet.

The ten winners used 39 different technology products in the redesign and creation of their respective intranets. While some of the winners relied heavily on HP or IBM solutions, open source software was especially popular. In addition to Apache, winners utilised Eclipse, Linux, Mambo, MySQL, Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), PostgreSQL, and TikiWiki.

Running open source Mambo 4.5 software as its content management system (CMS), Integer's Senior Developer Christiaan van Woudenberg was quick to sing the praises of the open source software. "Mambo was a core component of the design and (re-)creation of our new intranet,"he said. "Mambo's templating system allowed us to freely examine the user experience and graphic design of the intranet redesign without having to consider any interface constraints imposed by the Mambo CMS."

"From an information architecture standpoint, we fully embraced the Mambo ideal of components embedded in a framework,"van Woudenberg continued. "Each of our intranet-based custom applications is a separate component, which allowed us to rapidly deploy additional applications after our initial intranet launch."

Van Woudenberg also acknowledged the work of the Mambo community as crucial to the intranet's success. "We have benefited from the work of the Mambo community and have deployed customised versions of Stock Ticker, Classifieds, DocMan, Jobline, and SimpleBoard components to suit our multiple-agency access control system, implemented as a hack of the Mambo core,"he said. "We look forward to contributing to the Mambo community in the future, especially in the areas of usability and user experience."

Nielsen Norman Group's ten best intranets for 2005, in alphabetical order, are: