1. Re-designing your intranet
Department of Transport's journey

2. Re-designing your intranet
What I will cover
• The department and our working context
• Recognising when it’s time for a revamp or upgrade
• Doing the review and identifying new requirements
• Getting a new system
• Migrating to a new system
• Lessons learned and new site
• Plans for the future - Social intranet
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3. Re-designing your intranet
Working context
Governance
• Intranet team part of ‘Information Management & Administrative Services’
composed of myself the Manager, a Site administrator, a Coordinator & a System
administrator
• Internet & Intranet teams work across divisions – DotWeb team
• Intranet team work closely with Internal Communications
• Distributed authoring and high involvement
• Ad Hoc senior management involvement
where required.
Policy
• Disability Action Plan
• Web publishing guidelines
• Social media policy
• Internal communications review
• DOT Writing style guide
• PROV website archiving advice
• Whole of Victorian Government policies
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4. Re-designing your intranet
Old Site
•Built in Rapid Web Publisher [Lotus Notes] in
1998
•Internet and intranet use same software
•IA based on functions & activities not
organisational structure
•Over 2000 pages, 2000 documents
•250 distributed authors
•Enterprise search to run standard search &
‘Find a person’
•Archiving within product
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5. Re-designing your intranet
“The basics are right … ”
What works well
• Workflow and approvals
• Intranet team own & manage top levels – control IA
• Content organised around activities and functions
• Distributed authoring
• Simple authoring interface
• Standard & centralised training, plus desk visits and phone support
• 6 month expiry cycle on content
• Single intranet – no subsites
• Search covers intranet content – plus the department website & IT service provider
and contact list
• Good interactive applications available only from intranet [sticky factor]
• Archiving
• Centralised document repository
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6. Re-designing your intranet
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7. Re-designing your intranet

8. Re-designing your intranet
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9. Re-designing your intranet
“I’m sorry we can’t do that … ”
What does not work [of course!]
• Product not accessible – heavy reliance on tables to format content
• Inability to building interactive features that the business requires
• No policy and procedures A-Z or dynamic lista
• Extended Search out of support
• Business areas starting to use purpose built solutions
• Inability to put security on specific areas
• Centralised document repository – staff resentment re two step process
• Cost of hosting legacy systems on IT provider network
• Our old software is single point sensitive. Loss of product knowledge to provide
technical support
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10. Re-designing your intranet
“It’s working, why replace it? ”
Building the business case
• Initial attempt to participate in consortia purchase with 4 other Government
departments [the G4]
• Shared requirements document
• Business spending budget on external solutions, single point sensitive
• Centralised system cheaper, [training, backups, sustainable knowledge ...]
• Conduct review to identify what can be improved & run the same review after
migration
• Product selected for both sites : Matrix by Squiz
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11. Re-designing your intranet
Review
• Desk top evaluation for usability and accessibility
• Card sorting
• Discoverability
Result:
• Small changes – mixture of familiarity & usability
• Highlighted the low accessibility levels
• New requirements: A-Z policies area, forms
• Reinforcement re plain English labels. Gerry McGovern was right!
• People wanted white space, standardisation of content placement
• One new menu area ‘Facilities and Resources’
• List of functions that can only be build in new software
• Refreshed look and feel – home page etc.
Decision to move ‘like for like’ and no redesign at migration point
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12. Re-designing your intranet
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13. Re-designing your intranet
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14. Re-designing your intranet
‘Composing’ a new system
• Workshops – Metadata, workflows, user interface,
• Collateral – ‘as is – to be’ documents, page content
• Project documentation stored in our EDRMS [TRIM]
• Build concept site using every variation on internet and intranet site
• Negotiating the governance arrangement with our IT provider & WCMS vendor [Co
Lo]
• Building architecture : Postgres platform
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15. Re-designing your intranet
“What, no tables for layout! …. ”
Migration
• Preparation of content and migration
• 4-5 migrators – manual migration as each page needs touching.
• Content inventory using Excel spreadsheets, hierarchy, pages titles, URLs, issues,
page review dates, expiries, owners.
• Moved 4000 assets, consisting of 2000 document, 2000 pages, including images,
videos, sound files, forms, surveys
• Set up author/maintainer list
• Designing stylesheets for all our variations
• Moving in tandem with Transport website & the launch of a new stat body website
TSV
• Sharing one project manager
• Implementation of an Easy Edit interface for author
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16. Re-designing your intranet
“Oh dear …"
Lessons learned:
• Pages are not ‘like for like’. They are ‘close as possible’.
• Keeping it readable
• Don’t assume your site is cleaned up
• Nothing works like a Notes workflow – sigh
• Different browsers, Firefox v IE. – HTML
• Still need a suite of tools
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17. Re-designing your intranet
“What’s next ?“
Plans for the future:
• Social media – more!
• Social intranet
• Integrated desktop
• Embedded content
• Enterprise search
• SAS products
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