Using Sitecore for your company intranet is a new way to extract value from the customer experience platform. Its capabilities in the areas of content management and author experience, personalization, security and search make it a serious contender for your internal communication hub.

1. Sitecore Powered Intranets

2. A bit about us
Amanda Shiga
Vice President
nonlinear digital

3. The intranet in 2014

4. No longer a place to primarily see work –
it is the place for more employees to DO
more work.
• Your fastest way to find everything you need to do
your work
• Your role and daily tasks
• Your benefits and personal info
• Your view of the company
• Your projects and teams
• Your communities of practice
• Your best way to heard and provide feedback or input
trusted content
Many to many communication
Find information & knowledge
Drive efficiency thru self-service
Personalization
Deepen employee
engagement
Structured & adhoc
collaboration
Foster innovation
Ensure knowledge capture &
reuse

5. Intranet teams are growing
Responsive Design gaining traction
Agile development trending

6. Platform Options
Intranet Options

7. Key technology questions
• Existing licenses vs. Best of Breed
• Information flow between systems
• Capacity and resources

8. An Intranet is
Corporate
Divisional Pages
Communities & Teams
Projects & Workspaces
My Sites
Applications & BI

9. Sitecore can deliver highly engaging
intranets
• Sitecore CEP
• Roll your own solution
• No limitations on what
you can do, but
development heavy
• Sitecore Intranet Portal
• Older versions had an
“Intranet in a box”
• Latest version is
collection of APIs to
accelerate development
• Roadmap is unclear

10. What about SharePoint?
• SharePoint provides robust collaboration and enterprise
social network tools, web content management is
relatively weak
• Does not have to be a choice, but a combination.
- Don’t forget about the SharePoint Connector for Sitecore

11. Mixed solutions
Corporate
Divisional Pages
Communities & Teams
Projects & Workspaces
My Sites
Applications & BI
Sitecore does WCMS
SharePoint - Collaboration/ESN

12. Here’s how a few of our clients made the
decision to go with Sitecore
• An association who chose SIP (several years ago) – driven by time savings and ease of deployment
• A large oil & gas company was choosing between Sitecore and two other WCMS platforms.
- Intranet owned by Corporate Communications
- Focus on flexibility of platform, content authoring experience and personalization
• An oilfield services company was choosing between Sitecore and Sharepoint
- Intranet owned by Corporate Communications
- Emphasis on effective communications and employee engagement / WCMS features won out
• A telecom company who already owned Sitecore for their public-facing site chose Sitecore for the
content-focused part of the intranet, and Sharepoint for teamsites and collaboration
• If Sharepoint is already purchased, the sell is more difficult

13. Sitecore’s biggest intranet strengths
• Strong content management and authoring experience
• Delivery of personalized experience based on known
user profile characteristics
• Robust security model
• Coveo integration
• Licensed by instance, not seat

14. Single Sign On
Building an engaging Intranet on Sitecore
&
Active Directory

15. #1 Leverage existing user management
• Sitecore supports integration with Active Directory and
other Membership Providers
• Take advantage of extended user profile properties
within Sitecore

16. Active Directory Module Considerations
• Single domain requires careful planning of the security
mechanism – impacts authors and Intranet users
- Custom access rights
• Nested groups are non-performant, disable this unless
you really need it
- Recommend computed groups in AD for a flat structure
• Some custom code is needed on the session start (or
other location) to do a seamless login

17. Considerations for testing
• A Sitecore Intranet runs as impersonate if Windows
Auth is being used
• Plan for real users in Active Directory with a realistic set
of roles – run tests as them
• Application startup; ensure you know who starts the
application

18. #2 Deliver a personalized experience
DMS

19. Targeting by membership

20. Targeting by profile
• Office
• Location
• Division
• Manager

21. Engagement plans
• Onboarding engagement plan
- With known tasks and rhythms for new employees an
engagement plan can guide a new team member through
the process
• Training, certification engagement plan
- Some organizations require mandatory (re)certification,
engagement plans can be used to remind and track

22. #3 Engage with social and collaboration tools
Collaboration & Social

23. Media Library as a Document Library
• Upload files
• Secure files
• Automatic trimming

24. Sharepoint Integration Framework
• Can be used for document management in Sitecore
• Displays Sharepoint lists/items in Sitecore
• Live connection or sync’d
• Respects workflow state in Sharepoint

25. Ratings / Comments
• Page level ratings and
comments
• No approval or vetting,
but could be
implemented with
buckets

26. Member / People Listing
• List users from Sitecore
or Active Directory
• Provide contact
information
• Company directory,
project members, etc.

27. #4 Keep on the pulse with dashboards
Dashboards

28. WebParts or Build your own
• Sitecore’s WebPart Framework provides a nice mechanism
for users to create personalized dashboards
- You define a catalog of “widgets” that a user can add to a page,
customize and drag and drop
• You will need to build the integration points to pull the
data in place
• Can have performance limitations

29. WebPart Framework Considerations
• Default store for user preferences is the Core database
• Instantiation of the web part framework manager is a
bit heavy, don’t do it unless you need to
• Could build this yourself with a customization to Insert
Renderings Pipeline

32. #5 Measure effectiveness

33. Good intranet metrics
1. Percentage of completed personal profiles
2. Time on task
- Direct tie to business outcomes such as faster onboarding
- Calculation of time savings per task
3. Percentage of completed goals
4. Most popular searches (helps with labelling, prioritizing,
“how do I”)
5. Most popular content (home page politics)

34. Scaling Considerations
• With license limitations, you can host your website and intranet
on same Sitecore instance
- One authoring + master with two sites in tree
- Website delivery node secured to not show intranet content (based on
template type or other)
• User-generated content – how to save permanently? Back to
authoring / master via webservice, event queue or shared
database
• Don’t manage large volumes of users solely in Sitecore – integrate
with an enterprise-level Identity Management solution where you
can apply corporate policies

35. Recent Case Study
• Oil & Gas Company
• 5000 employees, expecting 20% yearly growth
• Needed a better way to onboard new staff, communicate effectively to
employees, maintain culture, consolidate information systems acquired through
acquisition
• Chose Sitecore for strength of content publishing and personalization
• Retiring legacy systems – immediately benefit on cost savings
• Feedback on revamped site has been positive and now accessible on mobile
device to field workers
• Next phase: increasing personalization, engagement plans “right content to right
person at right time” to drive efficiency

36. Questions
amanda@nonlinear.ca
@amandashiga