DorjeM

Add-PNPClientSideText Object reference not set to an instance of an object

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 22:14:00 +0000

When trying to use PNP to create SharePoint online pages I ran into this error.

Add-PnPClientSideText -Page "Offices" -Text "
City office
Free phone: 12345
" -Column 2 -Section 5 -Order 5

Add-PnPClientSideText : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:1 char:1
+ Add-PnPClientSideText -Page "Offices" -Text "
City office
< ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : WriteError: (:) [Add-PnPClientSideText], NullReferenceException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : EXCEPTION,SharePointPnP.PowerShell.Commands.ClientSidePages.AddClientSideText

The error is caused by having the page open in a browser window in Edit mode.
Once you click Publish on the page in the browser the code runs fine.

O365 first time login Password change required

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 19:54:00 +0000

Just logged into O365 with a new account and got the following error using Google Chrome

When I logged in using Microsoft Edge I got the change password screen.

The server can't sign you in right now. Please try again later. MSSPError=(-2147217382)loginpost(778)

X-ClientId: D9E0727DA9D04C63BD20E32C7EE40260
request-id 6d1cc7a0-5615-4fea-9b6c-2d9ac7690844
X-Auth-Error MSSPErrorException
X-OWA-Version 15.20.56.14
X-FEServer SYXPR01CA0061
X-BEServer MEXPR01MB1048
Date:9/24/2017 7:47:30 PM

Managing and growing your intranet

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 02:09:00 +0000

In 2009 and again in 2010 I ran two day workshops for intranet managers in Wellington New Zealand.

My goal was to try and provide some professional development for people who do what I do, and some extension for myself.

The events were organised by Bright*Star training with me providing the content and them providing the logistical support.

The intranet folks who attended gave me great feedback and I hope got a lot out of the experience.

Curriculum

Intranet assessment : providing a platform from which to grow
Decisions : taking us to and from the future
Square pegs and round holes : the right tool for the job
Fundamentalist leanings : identifying and delivering the pillars on which your organisation’s intranet will flourish
Putting yourself in their shoes : understanding what staff really need
Reaching in and out : making an intranet work for staff
Useful, usable and used
How do we know we’ve got to the future

What I found wonderful was that because the groups were small, and in one particular case very experienced, I was able to tailor the course to specific situations the attendees were in and having challenges with.

Flyers for each course

Managing and growing your intranet 2009 (PDF)

Managing and growing your intranet 2010 (PDF)

Kiwi Intranets - a little history

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:46:00 +0000

For my CV I just tried to document when I started the Kiwi Intranets group.
It was a little harder than I thought but thanks to the Way Back Machine I found out the date.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050623011812/http://www.brightstar.co.nz/calendar_conferences.htm

For 5 years I'd been slaving away working on an intranet and then I suddenly discovered there was a conference about the topic! Eureka. And even better it was in Auckland rather than overseas. Yeah! And even better my boss at the time had enough training money for me to be able to go, as long as I stayed with my sister.

So on August 15th 2005 I turned up at the venue in down town Auckland, tried the coffee and ran round the block to get something was coffee rather than just having a coffee label. The day blew me away, literally. I remember seeing Dan Randow and Mia Morrish speak about their respective recent activities.

By the end of the day I was really buzzing and so when I left the after event drinks, I walked down the road into a cyber cafe. I did have a laptop but I can't remember why I didn't use that. I sat down and for 4 dollars I signed up for an MSN group, and laid the foundations for Kiwi Intranets.

My goal was to have a place, online, where I could keep in contact with this wonderful group of people I had discovered. I found MSN groups a little clunky but after an hour or so I had a place for us.

The next day at the conference I let everyone know the web address, and asked them to sign up. And many people did.

A month later the shortcomings of MSN groups , and a very kind offer from Dan Randow saw us move over to the online groups platform. 16 September 2005 was the first post.

Here I am 9 years latter setting up shop as a contractor. Looking through the names of those who spoke at the event
http://web.archive.org/web/20050529052003/http://www.brightstar.co.nz/2005/events/conferences/august/A32/A32.htm

I'm sad that some of them are no longer with us; particularly Paul Reynolds, who I met several times and who I found inspiring for his great intellect and the fact he was so personable.
I remember David Archibald's enthusiasm, and some of it rubbed off on the various occasions I got to see him speak since then.
Nick Besseling and I subsequently organised an Auckland Kiwi Intranets lunch.
Mark Harrison gave great presentations at several of the latter Intranets conferences I chaired.
Sam Ng has turned his Optimal Usability business into a national and international success.
Dan Randow continues to help organisations collaborate.
And James Robertson still provides inspiration and motivation to intranet teams everywhere with his blog, and those in the south Pacific with his conferences.

Thank you everyone who has influenced me over the years since I found a community of practice.

I hope I'm able to contribute as much to our community in the coming 9 years as I've benefited.

Let me know what keeps you inspired in the comments section below.

Dorje

Mentoring intranet folks

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:44:00 +0000

From : https://flic.kr/p/inW8ZS

I ran a team of application developers at a New Zealand University for over a year.
One of the aspects of that role which I really enjoyed was working with each team member on their personal development.

With the people I was working with we found that individual mentoring was very effective.

Traditionally organisations have training budgets. The training budget is often used to send technical folks on a one, two or more day training course. In some cases the money is used to send people to a vendor or practitioner focused conference.

In my experience the training courses are given by either the technically gifted or those new to the field. Neither tend to be good trainers or teachers.

In my own experience and from the results I saw within my team there is a better way. We agreed as a group that where possible we would forgo the poor quality training and the questionable conferences and use the money to get a specialist / consultant in for a day or half day a month to work over the course of six months or more with a person.

The goals for each day's visit had to be defined prior to the specialist / consultant turning up so that they I could see we were getting value from the visit, so the specialist / consultant could prepare and so that the staff member being visited had concrete value they could demonstrate to the wider team.

Generally each visit consisted of some time having hard to solve problems talked through and possible solutions outlined. The other part of the visit would involve project / professional development activities. The professional development was directed so that it was of value to our organisation.

This arrangement was very well received by my team. From my perspective I got difficult issues resolved rather than left behind as well as up skilling my team. Other benefits were that my team found out about other ways of working from the visiting specialist / consultant, and discovered other organisations and individuals who do what they do. Often the peer relationships provided free advice and help when times were tight.

For intranet folks in New Zealand, and I believe around the world this mentoring model is a great solution to the problem of working a field which is relatively new, has little or no training, and few obvious career development opportunities.

So my challenge to you is . . . .

Comment below and let me know things you taught your fellow intranet folks that they thought were SUPER AWESOME. They can be in your organisation, working across the road or somewhere else around the world.

Intranet notifications - are they ruining your organisations performance ?

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:43:00 +0000

Photo by mbiebusch

Do you have the option for your staff to receive notifications via email from the intranet ?

If you do these notifications may be stopping your staff from getting a good nights sleep and working at their best the next day.

Christopher Barnes on the Harvard Business Review blog, in his article "workers disengaged", provides evidence of how damaging late night phone/device checking can be on performance the next day.

So if you're running an intranet and you allow staff to sign up for notifications or updates when changes are made have you optimised the scheduled tasks and cron jobs so that they don't send the notifications out in the middle of the night ?

Sharepoint has this feature allowing people to setup notifications when changes are made to libraries folders and lists they are interested in. Do you modify the jobs so that emails don't go out and disturb everyone's sleep ?

How else do the systems you have setup, which run when the servers are less busy, disturb everyones sleep ?

What a hotel website should be

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 13:57:00 +0000

SA Hotel Trat, Thailand

Online services for those who are travelling tend to be all about the supplier, or middle man, and not really for the person who will actually use the service.

For 8 months now my family and I have been travelling from the UK back across the world to New Zealand. Every few days we have been looking for a new hotel. And the hotel sites , and the cheap room sites all have their flaws. So when we found the website for the SA Hotel in Trat Thailand we exclaimed loud and long how good it was.

http://www.sahotel.in.th/

I'll warn you now it isn't pretty - but if like us you've looked at a lot of pretty hotel websites and still not really been able to make up your mind if it is the right place to stay I feel for you.

The best online presences for hotels are invariably those run by people who own and live at their own properties, and who are doing something different. A case in point is Les Manguiers http://www.mangokampot.com/ which again isn't pretty but gives you a real feel that you're going to be looked after

The really wonderful thing about the SA Hotel in Trat Thailand's site is that in one page it answers all the questions that their guests ask them everyday:

Is there an ATM/Supermarket/Restaurant/Night market nearby ?
Is it quiet ?
What are the rooms like ?
How much is a room ?

Most importantly it tells you what it is trying to be and what it is in the first paragraph :

a basic, yet complete & clean room to spend the night in relative comfort

Even better it tells you how much it is right there on the first page - no digging around hoping to stumble across the price. No having to go through a third party website.

Simple
Clean
Practicable
Useful

I hope they have a ton of business - their website fairly screams customer focus, it wish more were like it.

Leaving speech

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 05:00:00 +0000

After three years and six months at Lincoln University I am now officially unemployed and heading away on a gap year for grown ups with my family.

I started at Lincoln University in the position of Online Services Manager in October 2009. In April 2012 I became the Applications group manager as well as the online services manager. A friend in the US said “a Mexican promotion – two jobs, one salary”, which it was but it was more than that as well. I became responsible for a team of six people who helped me and whom I hope I helped. It is them and the other people I worked with at Lincoln University that I really tried to express my thanks to in my leaving speech.

I’m blogging my speech because my dad asked for a copy and several people were unable to attend. It starts using the Maori language and ends using the Tibetan language.

----------------

Te whare tipuna e tu nei

Te University e takoto nei

Tena korua

Nga hau e wha

Nga iwi e tau nei

Tena koutou katoa

Thank you everyone for coming , though I’m sure you’re only here for the free food.

When I got my job at Lincoln University a very good friend of mine who has worked with many Australasian universities said

“congratulations, I’ll be impressed if you achieve anything”

When I asked him why he said

“because it’s a university”

I’ll come back to this point later on.

Last year I gave a talk to new staff, and in it I showed them a bar chart about as tall as I am (2m long) with a 5cm blue section on one end. I asked them what they thought it might be.

No one knew what it was until I put the date 1878 at one end, and someone said “that is the length of time Lincoln has existed”. Which it is.

I then asked “what is this little blue bit here?” I explained that was the length of time I had been at Lincoln. Looking at the difference I pointed out to them that the organisational momentum for an institution as old as ours explains why believing you can change things is a little self centred.

This morning over coffee Andrew Frapwell pointed out that the amount of work our organisation does has grown exponentially. And that got me thinking and forced me to rewrite my speech.

I think there are two reasons I was able to achieve things, despite working in a university:

You all gave up your time in my first few weeks to tell me what you did and share what you knew about Lincoln
Since 1878 the amount of change occurring has grown exponentially.

So my short time here has coincided with unprecedented desire and need for things to happen.

Some of them we wished for

new websites – thank you to all you editors who continue to make our online presence vibrant.
entity blogging – thank you to the Ecology team for blazing the way, Roland for the VandO blog, and Derrick for the Drylands blog.
social media – well done Alana on our 10,000 member Facebook audience.

some of the things that happened we didn’t wish for

the fact that some of our friends and family are no longer with us.
the shaky ground we’ve had over the past 2 years.

Professionally and personally Lincoln has been wonderful for me . . . . apart from a couple of bits, but the less said about them the better.

Most of you won’t know but my association with Lincoln goes back to before I was born. Dick Lucas was a twinkle in my mother’s eye long before I was and Alan McKinnon ensured the familial genes were well settled before I got here.

As a child the Nepali students of the 70’s and 80’s told me stories of their time here too.

So when I got to campus I had a sense of the place, and it’s importance in the world.

Many of you here and some who aren’t here any longer made me welcome and have helped and supported me. For this I thank you and wish you all well.

Tujay-chay Tujay-chay Tujay-chay

Intranets 2013 Sydney

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Wow - it's rolled around again.

Intranets 2013 registrations are about to open and this year you can bring the intranet / digital workplace love into your personal life [which I'm sure you all do because you live and breathe intranets 24/7] via the Intranets2013 FaceBook page

https://www.facebook.com/Intranets2013

15th - 17th of May in Sydney you'll be able to experience the best Intranet conference in Australia, Austral asia, the world - that I've ever been too.

http://www.steptwo.com.au/conference

This year Sam Marshall (Clearbox consulting) , Matthew Phillips (Intranetizen) and Kim Sbarcea are presenting.

Looking forward to it.

Heading home

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 03:54:00 +0000

Just one of the many great slides
used during the team presentations.

Today each team presented their case studies to the Faculty members (those running and presenting the conference) and to the other attendees.

Five teams with five very different approaches to presenting the same material. Each of the teams during the week had perceived different aspects of the material we have had presented to us. And so Carrie's presentation, which went into Rashomon effect, played out in large. The material that resonated with each group, they reflected back through their presentations. So we ended up with five different views of the past five days, through the presentations. All were funny, some were inspired and a couple were wonderful.

Prior to lunch and heading home, the summing up included a couple of great end of event exercises. The first provided the opportunity to set goals and have them followed up on. The later one gave every person a chance to express themselves in the context of the team. [you'll have to get selected for the CAUDIT Leadership Institute to find out the specifics :-) ]

Thanks to all the attendees and faculty members for helping me learn more about myself and them through their sharing.

Particular thanks and namaste to my team Abbey, Andrew, Joseph, Bruce, David, Yasna and Willie our faculty member.

I'll follow this up with a summary of why I think this event was valuable to me and could be valuable to others.

Dorje

Penultimate – reflection and influence

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 13:19:00 +0000

Hot damn I finally got a swim.

By the end of the day to day my team, team sky, was pretty burnt out so Andrew, Abbey, Yasna and I plus a couple of others did the pools. There are three. We should all probably have been working but we probably aren't ever going to get the chance to talk and swim at the same time again.

Three very interesting (for me) and different sessions today

Carrie Regenstein of Carnegie Mellon - took us through successful influencing.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington of ANU - gave us a tour de-force of what a great presentation can be. Passionate, direct and inspiring. It covered a Deuputy Vice-Chancellor's view of senior managers issues and design principles for a modern university. She also answered some curly questions from the attendees.
Judy Stokker provided a building block for all attendees - how to actively manage your career.

The Caudit cocktail - thanks to
Nimrod / Karina and team green

Active and Reflect have been two common themes that have run through this week for me. I've been going to the Yoga sessions every morning at 6:25. I've never been before and this morning I found it particularly challenging. In many respects it has reflected the day I end up having. Today Yoga was attended by a modest number (lots of folks were at the pub the night before). We did a large number of downward facing dog, don't worry if you don't know what that is, suffice to say it is as hard as some of the self reflective work we did today with Carrie and Judy.

Intentional could substitute for active. In our Yoga we're expected to be graceful and intentional. In the material Carrie and Judy provided they outlined how being intentional in our careers, and in how we manage those above and below us is made easier by us making what we do look effortless.

I've been a tour guide, and it strikes me that the same intentional approach applies there. Your clients/staff/boss expects you to provide consistency and support no matter what the request. Being intentional about what you say, do, and how you react to these requests makes you more trusted. The virtuous spiral then begins to grow, the more you're trusted the more you're intentional actions, use of emotional intelligence, personal self knowledge become part of the work landscape, the more your clients/staff/boss relies on you.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington is the pinnacle of this virtuous spiral, leader in her academic field and leader of her aspect of her institution. For me her presentation showed me that she had also mastered that art, to the point where like your voice or the words you write you're able to influence others with it at will.

The great thing about today was that, I think, we (the attendees) have all begun to see that while some have innate skills in certain areas no-one is rounded and that most skills can be improved. The key to realising my (your) potential is to

make time to reflect, on experiences feelings and your future.
actively make choices about what to do with your reflective discoveries.

More on this after I've had a sleep.

Dorje

PS Thanks to Karina for the photos in this post one from a morning walk and one from last night :-)

CAUDIT Leadership Institute - the morning after

Teams a Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:04:00 +0000

A wonderful stow away in
my luggage - family support.

Something interesting happened to us today, we became productive teams.

At the start of the week we were put into (mostly random) groups that by the end of the week are expected to work up and present on a case study. The team I'm part of, team sky, has dipped its toes into the case study prior to today but this morning most of us were reading it after breakfast. Throughout the day it became a pivot, so much so that we ended up working on it for three hours, from the end of formal events until after the bar opened [Doh!].

A lot of what we covered this morning, and our Belbin team roles work yesterday came into play. This morning Liz Gosling had yet another stand out activity which really got everyone in the room, and each of the teams we're members of thinking pretty hard. What was great was that David in our team came up with a left field suggestion, which it turns out has only happened once before in the past 5 years. Come along in 2013 to have your own A hah! moment in this organisational decision making session.

The following sessions were on emotional intelligence and managing for performance. Willie Pritchard took us through an introspective look at our own emotions through the emotional intelligence framework by Mayer and Salovey, popularised by Daniel Goleman's book. Again Willie's low bullet point per slide, eliciting of experiences from the group and engaging style made for an interesting and useful session. For myself, and a couple of other attendees I've talked to since, the tactics of:

reflecting on events good and bad was a timely reminder that intentional reflection and making time for it is a valuable thing to do.
seek out a mentor and or trusted colleague whit whom you can share emotionally charged work events to get perspective.

Managing for performance was run by Judy Stokker. She outlined to us what is and isn't the manager's role. Some options for creating motiviational environments, and the TRAC relationship model.

T - trust
R - respect
A - affection
C - confidence

Judy also covered performance issues, and elicited a lot of experiences from all those present which added to the emotion in the room. Usefully for me she went over tips for having more successful performance related meetings as well as ways of giving feedback well. Finally she provided us with a small case study to work in our groups on regarding a gifted staff member.

After afternoon tea we came back in for the formal time set aside for working on our team sky response to the case study set at the start of the week. With the presentation on Friday everyone was keen to get things underway. Talking with one of my team's members after dinner we both felt that our team had a very good dynamic, but right at this point everyone was suggesting great ideas but we plunged from helicopter view to face down in the weeds every few minutes. Fortunately we had an enforced circuit breaker for the attendee photograph. While out for the photo another member of our team who has a lot of experience and had been trying to keep us on task suggested we change the way we were working to try and move us beyond our death spiral. Bingo, a change in the way we were documenting our project planning and we were performing, just at Tuckman predicts in his stages of group development.

We'd been artificially formed by the organisers of the event, we'd normed over the past couple of days as everyone learnt a little about each other, we'd stormed and frustrated each other with earlier exercises and the start of our case study and finally we'd broken through that wall and started performing. What was really interesting was that everyone in the team was happy to commit more than the allotted time to getting as far as we could. So much so that we were late for the launch of the special CAUDIT cocktail.

All in all a useful time, for me and everyone I got the chance to ask today.

Dorje

Leadership day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:01:00 +0000

Today's focus was on leadership.

Dinner Tuesday with the CAUDIT
Leadership Institute team

We covered leadership for and of change with Nick Tate first off. This was followed by Peter Nikoletatos on the Situational Leadership framework, what being a CIO is about and how to manage challenging staff. Willie Pritchard followed lunch with Interpersonal communication, a look into preferred styles and those of your coworkers. Liz Gosling rounded out the day with a big session on Effective Teams and our own Belbin team traits. Beach cricket and a meal out in Kingscliff finished everyone off.

Due to some technical challenges I missed the beach cricket, but that did mean I had time to fill in session feedback surveys and have a brief look at our homework case study.

Nick's talk on change management I appreciated as it was done using slides like those I prefer, lots of bold images. Nick has a dry and very wry wit which he used to great effect in his talk by setting the audience up to think one thing and then surprising them (and thus getting their attention) by saying the unexpected. Historical leaders of change provided Nick with some great material for expanding on Dr Kotter's change steps , the impact of these at the personal level, and how it is a relatively well understood process.

Peter Nikoletatos reinforced that this week is to give the attendees tools that can be adapted to our own environments and styles. Peter made the point that leaders get people to do things because they want to, unlike managers who tell people to do things. We were then asked to question ourselves about

what sort of leaders we think we are; directors, coaches, supporters, delegators
what of our predecessor's work we think we will build on
what we hope to leave as a legacy of our time with our organisations

The hot discussion in this session came out of the Jack Welsh vitality curve , specifically how to deal with the bottom 10% of staff. This in turn lead to a discussion around managing difficult staff. Peter outlined self regulation within teams is a useful technique. Firm by fair was also discussed , with the proviso that you seek help from others as impartial arbiters to ensure you're being both firm and fair.

Willie Pritchard ran the next session on interpersonal communication. Willie's presenting style I like a lot he came out into the audience, asked the audience for their experiences and generally lowered the bullet point per slide average for the day very nicely. As with the other presenters today Willie incorporated a team based task, in his case based around Dr David Merrill's social style theory of different types of communicators: analytical, amiable, driver, expressive. This led on to realising you can only modify yourself and so being able to identify different styles those you interact with have, provides you with the chance to "style flex" and have more productive communications.

Our Belbin pre event work was next. Liz Gosling took us through effective teams, our own experiences of the good and the ugly. We went over our Belbin summaries and then put those together with the other folks on our tables to see what sort of team member traits our table team was missing. We then worked through a challenging, and for me at least, interesting exercise with our group. Liz then brought us back to the diagram Peter had introduced in the morning, and how it too could have the team styles and Tuckman's team development model overlaid on it.

Our short break before beach cricket turned into a technical issue for me so I didn't catch up with everyone until dinner time. Again this was interesting because the people on this week are so diverse. I learned a lot from my table mate about the Navy, and what you can achieve if you apply yourself to a different job every few years in a single institution.

I'm enjoying getting to know the very varied individuals here. What I'm having trouble with is sitting down all day (I work at a standing desk) and the fact that the sessions are 90 - 120 minutes long. For my learning style shorter sessions with more interactive group work would be better.

Two observations to finish:

many many of the people present are diagram / picture / kin-esthetic learners.
most people present have had other jobs/careers prior to getting into the IT or Library game.

Leave a reply below to let others know what you discovered about day 2 of the CAUDIT leadership institute 2012. Dorje

CAUDIT Leadership institute day one

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:34:00 +0000

Team building with team sky.

Well day one almost complete, and my head is fit to split.

When I got to the venue I had 45 minutes to get myself sorted out prior to kick off so I opened my room ranch sliders and could hear; nail gun, minor birds and children in the pool. I'm not sure what worried me more the thought of minor birds with nail guys or children in a pool with them :-).
That was about the last simple thought I've had since lunchtime.

Apart from my splitting head when the conversation swung around to Microsoft "surface" and the difficulties of "apple" products again I knew it was time to go to bed.

Arriving on Kiwi time I was starving by lunchtime and I hadn't had time to go out to the shops (if there are some, I still haven't got a sim card for my phone).

Tip 1 - Beg borrow or steal a Sim card, there were only Vodofone ones available in Brisbane airport at rather steep prices. Lucky for me I'd sorted out getting the train from the airport down and thanks to Queensland rail I had free wifi for the whole trip so I got out the emails I'd backed up on the plane and answered a couple of others.

Tip 2 - (and I should have remembered it from when I used to go to the US and UK for work) DON'T travel long distances on the same day you have to do hard cognitive work. I was up at 3am NZ time to be here at 12 noon AU time (about 11hours). Now it's nine oclock local time and I'm absolutely stuffed.

Through the introductions in the afternoon and team exercises I've been lucky enough to get to talk with most of the "faculty", the folks organising and presenting at the event. I tweeted the first section of the day where they introduced themesleves https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40dorjem%20%23cli2012

The first part of the afternoon brought up that this event operates under the Chatham house rules. As one attendee put it "what goes on tour stays on tour". Puts me in a bit of a quandary as I've been asked to blog about the event. I'll just have to use my judgement as I go along and take out people and organisations things where necessary.

We got back our Belbin team role assessments - I'm supposed to look them over and answer another questionaire tonight but I'm off to bed and possibly Yoga in the morning,

The participants are a very varied crew; I've spoken with house renovators, electrical engineers, people who've built roads in Western Australia and computer science majors; all of whom are now up and comming in the University IT world. To a fault interesting and more importantly interested. I'm just sorry I'm being Nigel No Mates and heading to bed so soon.

From an intranet perspective it has been and interesting day - several people are working through very challenging intranet implementations in both large and small organisations. One item of note is that I've had two talk to me about the overhead associated with SharePoint. In both cases we agreed that there is something to be said for scripted languages e.g PHP because they allow for more rapid, lower infrastructure, less trained staff to actually make a difference in days rather than weeks.

I'm looking forward to my brain working tomorrow and getting some more details around these experiences.

Dorje

A bad photo of Pelicans
because they're the best birds ever

Intranet leadership training

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 23:59:00 +0000

VicRoads Intranet mouse mat -
from Oyster Design

In a couple of days I'll be attending the CAUDIT Leadership Institute.

My background is in the intranet or online workspace, and one of the issues that I've seen coming through in the discussions I've had with other intranet and online workplace managers over the past five years or so is the need for professional development.

Increasingly there are opportunities for development within the Intranet / Online workplace domain e.g.

StepTwo's AsiaPacific Intranets conference
Intranet Leadership forum - also by StepTwo
Intranet benchmarking forum - in Europe

But there are few opportunities that provide for the development of skills essential to effective intranets but not specific to them e.g.

Project management
Team work and oversight
Managing your manager/organisation
Career planning and development

These are the types of skills the CAUDIT Leadership Institute outline in the programme, during their yearly week long event.

In my experience it is the ability of intranet / online workspace managers to marry a whole range of skills; technical, interpersonal and organisational that makes them successful. Within the IT realm this mixture tends to be fairly rare. As such I'm really looking forward to meeting the other attendees who only really have two things in common:

Work in the Tertiary education sector.
Are associated with IT within their organisations.

The blurb on the front of the CAUDIT Leadership Institute site says

The CAUDIT Leadership Institute is a dynamic, immersive program designed to enhance the leadership skills of Australian and New Zealand information technology and information resources managers in higher education. It is an outstanding opportunity to share information with peers and participate in hands-on learning experiences.

One thing I found somewhat difficult about attending was that though the blurb sounds great their isn't a lot to support that on their site. Normally I would expect the site to provide some fairly detailed information so that:

I can decide if this course is right for me.
I can convince my organisation to pay for me to attend AND spare me for the week not at work.

In this case there isn't this level of detail. Looking back over the courses run in previous years there isn't much detail either. The one thing I did notice is that the programme topics and many of the presenters haven't changed much in the past few years. Which would tell me that they've got a successful combination.

So I asked my manager why he thought it was valuable for me to attend. His response was that we don't do enough of this type of development and that he had heard from several past participants how valuable it had been to them and their organisations.

When I heard this I realised why their wasn't a huge ammount of detail on the site. In New Zealand and Australia word of mouth is the most valuable marketing medium. This brings me back to the intranet / online workspace world. In any organisation it is your intranet's reputation that is a key factor in it's success, and much of that reputation related to word of mouth rather than communications or PR or giving staff mouse mats. Often good word of mouth directly relates to time spent with members of your organisation showing them the intranet and what it can do for them.

So if you're embarking on, or already into, your intranet / online workspace manager career make sure you:

attend domain specific professional development events. Even if it is just having a coffee with someone who runs an intranet in your area.
spend time thinking and working toward improving your other skills as well.

Dorje

[Clarification - when the decision to attend the CAUDIT Leadership institute week was being made there was little information about each of the events each day available. As such this post is in that context. Since then the CAUDIT Leadership institute team have created a new website, which has outlines of each of the sessions that are very useful. Dorje]

CAUDIT leadership institute - attendees perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 01:01:00 +0000

Happy to put my head, and those of others, into
the crocodile's mouth.

Most of you reading this blog will know that in the past two and a half years or so I've been working for a University here in Canterbury New Zealand as their Online Services manager. We've had some great wins, particularly with our intranet for those who "don't want to learn anything new".
In the past few months I've received a promotion and, thanks to the willingness of the team I work with to also take on more responsibility, I am now the Applications manager / Online services manager.

As part of this move into a managerial role, though I have seen a lot of CSS and javascript lately, It was suggested that I attend the CAUDIT Leadership Institute (previously the CAUDIT-EDUCAUSE Institute). This course is designed as a professional development program for those who manage some aspect of information technology and resources in higher education, whether within their department or for the entire institution.

Anyway, Tricia of the CAUDIT Leadership Institute (CLI) team asked for volunteers on Monday to contribute as guest bloggers to the CLI blog, as first time attendees. Not being shy about putting my head in the crocodile’s mouth I put my hand up.

As always these and my guest blog posts on the CAUDIT site are my views and don’t reflect my employer’s views. . . ya da ya da ya da..

Right with the disclaimer out of the way, disclosure. I’m not getting paid to do this, nor do I have any affiliation to CAUDIT other than my employer paying the fee for me to attend the Leadership Institute event next week.

What I’m going to focus on is my experience, in the next post I’ll go back to when I first got introduced to CAUDIT and the Leadership Institute. From their I’ll put up some of my thoughts on what the value to my organisation and myself appear to be. Once we’re on the week I’ll give an attendees perspective and hopefully follow that up with some of the changes that come out of my attendance.

The CLI blog and my blog posts will differ a little in that here I'll be reflecting on my experiences at the CLI course from the perspective of an intranet professional.

Ciao

dorje

I don't want to learn anything new intranet

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:55:00 +0000

This post will appear as I'm giving the talk that it relates to in Sydney at Intranets 2012.

The title for the talk was

The "I don’t want to learn anything new" intranet — a SharePoint intranet for 21 to 75 year olds

I'm sad that one quote I really wanted to get into the talk was from James Robertson who when I got my job said

James: Congratulations. I'll be really surprised if you can achieve anything.
Dorje: Thanks, but why ?
James: You got a job at a university. But you do have one thing going for you . . . . . it's a small university.

Now in large part I got the job I have thanks to James and his then team Catherine and Cairo. So this post is a thanks to them, and an a little dig at James in that I did achieve something.

I'll share the slides via SlideShare. The blog is to provide some background to some of the slides and provide a way for those in the session to ask questions when it suits them. So please post your questions.
[if you've got two screens I wrote this going through the slides consecutively, so having them open while you follow along through the blog will probably work best]

SharePoint 2010 intranet

View more presentations from Dorje McKinnon

Most of us don't get to have a green fields intranet to develop, we're working on improving or replacing an existing one. A key task that seems to take many intranet teams a long time is sizing up what already exists, the content audit. These two tools helped us do this quickly i.e. less than 1/2 a day and easily.

Xenu link sleuth

This tool is a broken link checking tool . . . that also has a great little report on the site you point it at. So this gives you a VERY quick way to analyse the number of HTML, jpg, pdf, word etc content items. This means you've got an idea on how much content work you've got to do to review, remove, and transfer.
It also has a nice little HTML report showing you the menu structure of your site.

GNU wGet

Is an old tool but a goody. It lets you download an entire website using a single command line instruction. Which meant for us that uploading our static content into our new CMS was a matter of copying and pasting all our PDFs and JPG files. Took about 30mins.

Intranet projects have input from both ends of an organisation:

Senior sponsors tell you what needs to be delivered
Users of the intranet provide you with information about where they need help

Needs analysis techniques (there are many) but particularly contextual enquiry provide you the intranet owner with the best, did I say the VERY BEST, way to help make your work useful.

References - Patrick Walsh | Gerry Gaffney | James Robertson

The great thing about going out and sitting and talking with your users is that you build trust, which is really useful during the roll out phase, and you learn the foibles that trip you up if you haven't done them. In our case staff name lengths could have made our home page Staff introduction feature difficult, but we found out early on and could incorporate the reality into the final design.

We documented our senior sponsor requirements, and the functional requirements that came out of our needs analysis into a prioritised list. So that using our agile methodology we could deliver the most important functionality first.

New home page
News article tool to provide central repository for news items, support for faculty department newsletter editors, cross over of content from one faculty to another
White pages first cut ; updateable, searchable, groupable, printable information from active directory View of individual provides “update” link which opens an email.
Like and Comment
Required page types, templates, intranet master pages on which all else hangs BaseTemplate.aspx (default), PlaceHolderTemplate.aspx, SearchTemplate.aspx, Intranet master page Including defined meta data values, specified by Lincoln University, in line with records keeping requirements Display user who last edited the page next to date page last edited in DD/MMM/YYYY format.
Search
Top mega menu
Calendar tool which replaces the ASP system already in place.
Buy sell information exchange
Staff introduction random for home page
RSS dynamic content control
Generic way to display on home page information specific to the viewing user. Information may come from leave, HR, payments, or other operational systems.
Multicolumn page types and templates
Web form development, replacing existing paper forms and processes

We then took each one of these functional requirements, and created a blog post for it on an internal staff only blog. Each entry had the same headings so that comparison across functionality was possible and to provide the same framework for staff working on the project. The headings were

Short name for the functional item
Business requirements
Opportunity
Value
Risk
Business context
Tangible benefits
Intangible benefits
Success factors
Scope and Limitations
Design considerations
Users and user roles
Functional elements and detail
Layout
Deliverables
Training
Documentation
Plan
Reporting

Several things stopped this project in it's tracks.

The first was the earthquake of September 2010, which was centred just around where I work. As most staff live nearby and many were impacted the project team worked on supporting essential services rather than the project.
The second was the earthquake of February 22st 2011. Physically my workplace was up and running within a week, but emotionally staff and students needed more time. Again the project team focused on their families, then their communities, then at work on providing essential services where staff vacancies were common due to the, then and continuing overhead of managing the paperwork associated with major disasters.
The third setback was the disintegration of the consulting firm doing key aspects of the SharePoint 2010 intranet project on our first project day.

Key through all these events was the need to support and retain key people. Fortunately we had an exceptionally understanding project sponsor who trusted in us to deliver their project for them. They were also realistic about the changing priorities that existed, allowing the project to pause with no repercussions.

We did a number of things well that I think you can benefit from.
We were realistic with the level of completeness or detail we did things. Full blown microsoft project plans were what we needed to instil confidence with the senior management team, but once the project started they were too heavy weight for he workload undertaken so a single page project plan was implemented. Needless to say the mind map project plan just didn't fly with anyone other than me.

We visualised data in a way that instilled confidence. Just like your users you should spend time getting to understand your senior sponsors and those they deal with. Because we did this we came up with a single graph which conveyed all they needed to know if our project finances were getting out of control.

Following the same tenants we used a variation of agile development methodology that incorporated aspects of scrum. All our project team sat in one room, all our tasks were postit notes on a white board. As a task came up it was put in the TODO column, then moved into a person's box in the centre of the board while they were working on it. Once done the postit was moved into the DONE section. Problems and blockages were addressed every morning, prioritised and worked through before new problems.

We actually did quite a lot.
The first 10 of our functional items were delivered by our go live date
AND we didn't compromise on our rollout strategy to get them done, we still had time to go out and spend with key users, give talks, provide training and give away a chocolate fish to the person who's suggestion for the intranet's name was used.

We allow any staff member to add a news item or comment or like it, using SharePoint 2010's social features. In the same way that no one stands up during an organisational meeting and tells the CEO the're an idiot we get no inappropriate use of these tools because staff names, and photos attend every comment, like and news item they add.

Existing tasks staff do we've exposed via our mega menus, above the supporting reference material. Thus indicating to staff that ours is a "digital workplace where we expect you to do things". This lead to a number of existing tools being removed and updated. Their previous location meant they were hidden from staff and had become outdated. Moving to the new intranet, and focusing on tasks, meant outdated and poor quality processes and tools became exposed. This in turn facilitated or precipitated their being removed or updated.

This theme of poor quality data facilitating change continued, and through other projects is ongoing.

One of the senior management team requirements was an updated whitepages. When I started in 2009 the most recent phone list was a PDF from 2007.

We decided that SharePoint as a user interface for stafTo do f to edit their Active Directory properties e.g. title, manager, phone etc was the right way to go. We married this with Forefront Identity Manager (a multi system synch engine) to provide the business logic and we now have the tools to allow staff to update almost any field associated with themselves and get it back into our other systems.

Because of the senior management directive about updated information we went to the source of this information, secretaries and admins sitting with actual staff. Our large spreadsheets we pumped back into sharepoint and active directory. So that on go live we had the most up to date information possible. And staff using SharePoint had a way of keeping this information up to date.

In going through this process we found that some information about staff, traditionally owned by one part of the organisation, wasn't up to date because they weren't resourced to maintain that information. With some robust discussion this project facilitated a cultural change by

showing the information was out of date
updating the information
providing a way for it to be kept up to date

The information we're talking about is each staff member's title.

Now most organisations just ARE NOT going to let everyone change their own title. We let people do it without any approval. Changes are audited, and staff do review the "live" white pages for incorrect titles. So far only one person has changed their title to Vice-chancellor, and changed it very quickly once they realised everyone else could see it. Visibility of the change and who did it seem to be the keys that have allowed our situation to work. We're now looking at how we could allow any staff member to change their manager field without approval.

Photos
Another way in which we've seen exposing poor quality data resulting in improvement is with staff photos. We didn't have high quality photos for all staff, but we did have about 90% coverage of staff with a photo. So we used the poor quality ones. Everywhere on the intranet that someone does something their photo is displayed. The buy sell swap section of the intranet is where we get the most complaints

"Please remove my photo"
"I don't like my photo"

Most of these we tell the staff member to visit the photographer, who takes great photos, to get themselves looking like a rock star. If the staff member wishes to escalate their request, we have an agreement with the HR team that they argue the value of having photos and then recommend to the intranet manager if the photo should be removed. Of about 1000 staff we have 2 staff that for safety reasons have had their photos removed.

User spotlight
Our staff member intro on the home page is building a sense of us as an organisation rather than me as a member of my department. It is also great for finding out the name of the person who says hello every morning in the carpark.
We display, name, title, photo and if we have it the staff member's interests. Each interest is a link which takes you to a list of other staff with that interest.
We've seen clusters of staff filling out their interests as they're prompted by their friends who know what they're into.
Our plan is to then translate this knowledge of how to update your profile interests, into staff updating the projects they've worked on and the skills they have.

One of the key premises of our intranet is "finding the right person faster". This information scent is key to facilitating this over time.

Summary

Do your needs analysis (even if your project is finished).
Spend time and effort buying in and or developing a great team to work with AND to work for.
Communicate appropriately to your stakeholders, sponsors, users, and team.

in senior management speak, for them
in benefits and changes for users
in actions and takss for the team

Projects don't finish on go live - success should be measured on how much adoption is achieved!!!
So make sure your project has a needs analysis phase and a rollout/adoption phase. The only thing you should alter is the number of functional items you deliver.

DO not compromise on the analysis and adoption aspects of any project!

And finally remember exposing poor quality data can help you get control of the data you need for success.

intranets 2012 - Dean Barker Blend interactive

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:26:00 +0000

because twitter have blocked me I'm blogging Dean's talk

Employees publish - senior managers "NO WAY!"

Where is fear coming from of social intranets for C level managers ?
Came up with mock screen capture deck.
Modified each one with more and more social features.
Successive ones moved from third to first person.
Then added microblog to the screen capture.
Then changed top microblog item to be more and more inflammatory.

Planned trigger points - non-related information / personal opinions / information mildly inflamatory

used microblog posts to introduce the trigger points.

Then went through captures with WHY they bothered C level managers in during interviews. Were looking for "reach for the phone moment"

Eight major concerns, 3 were US business law related
Top 5 (may or may not be legitimate concerns, these are fears)

lack of social filters,
some things JUST don't get talked about at work e.g. bald ceo comes back from holiday with hair.
There are people who don't know the orgs social norms. New hires / professionals
Hip young person would embarass self and thus embarass those who hired him.

Has occoured - 5%
others would be concerned - 35%
diffusion of offical communication
how does the employee know if it is Offical ?
How can employees know what they are accountable on ?

"Social intranet is another channel - enterprise was once afraid of email too."
productivity,
less concerned with actual productivity loss, more concerned with perceived loss of productivity.
45% respondents were worried about what others might think
asymmetrical usage,
some will communicate a lot
some won't communicate much
What value judgements will people draw from this ?

Of all questions this was highest with "has occoured"

"comfort with social intranet tools is likely generational"
Mob mentality
Number one issue for C level.
"if one person complains everyone will complain" "broken window theory"
coupled it with "organisational surface tension" . A lot of managers live in fear of all the unhappy employees speaking up at the same time.

second highest in survey "has occoured"

comments "yup happened here"

"Easiest concern to fix is a specific, tactical one. Much more difficult to fix are systemic culture shifts. The things you have to read between the lines to find out. Employee empowerment is the biggest systemic culture shift"

Interviews done with C level - survey respondents done by intranet managers

We then surveyed major concerns. Got 50 responses, with great comments from US Scandinavia , mostly large corporates

Overall - "other people will be concerned" was much more the issue than the people actually involved.

Overall move to social intranet, is like move from newspaper to the town hall model. So decision makers will be uncomfortable.

Possible solutions

1 - localise communication, inter team communication is less scary. "communication needs context, knowing them offline gives the context". Localisation builds context.

2 - ease employees into deep end. Tie the ability to contribute to the time in organisation. Access and priviledges expand with time elapsed from date of hire.
e.g. first 30days intranet read only

3 - leverage your vendor's experience
Some fears are irrational therefore you tend to pretend issue doesn't exist
Other people have solved your issue

4 - benefit must be sold
Remember some people believe "all organisational communication carries risk"
Do not assume the decision maker understands the benefit or ROI

Common theme from surveys
"social intranet is just another communication channel" - best argument , it stands alongside all other tools e.g. phone, email

Question response
Benefits of social intranet ?

employee empowerment means different things to employees over C level managers. Easy to overcome by demonstrating speed questions are answered e.g. yammer.
allows management to keep finger on pulse of organisation

Policy for internal social media ?
Don't really need one that is too different from the email policy you have. Perhaps an appendix to it.
External social media policy is very different.

>> Still blocked from using Twitter because I've exceeded my limit https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364#

Twitter has killed me

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:48:00 +0000

I've at Intranets2012 and Twitter have just stopped me tweeting

#intranets2012 damn!!! I've hit my twitter daily limit of 1000 tweets 11:42 am Syd time https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364#

anyone know how to get around this ?!!

Intranets not working

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sat, 12 May 2012 02:18:00 +0000

Photo adapted from Magnus_d

For those of you who know Gerry McGovern you'll be used to his "shock and awe" tactics. I was glad to see that he knows about Jame's little get together in Sydney next week and as such shot a broadside across the bows of this upcoming soirée.

Gerry's article was titled THE REAL REASON WHY INTRANETS AREN’T WORKING ! Just about enough to get some goats going.

I agree with Gerry that most intranets, would you believe even the ones I've worked on, are indeed "a swamp of gross inefficiencies".

I'm picking that the great and good of the Intranet world in Asia Pacific, present at Intranets 2012 will provide some insights into how to begin draining the swamp and providing "digital workplaces" where the staff are moved out of the "suck zone" faster and more quickly become "minimum badass users" [as per Kathy Sierra's presentation at Webstock 2012].

Several of the responses to Gerry's post I've seen have pointed out that teaching users to use the tools they have, before providing new ones would be a great help. I agree. So much so that I've been looking, unsuccessfully so far, for

an intranet based typing tutor that has some pedagogical basis, so we can move folks from 2 finger pokers to both hand typists.
At a guess the productivity gain would be about 30%.
really great "how do I" training modules for Outlook / Word / Excel and an introduction to code scripting.
Any one of these would provide a 10 - 50% increase in productivity.

Oh and both of them would give your staff a real value proposition for visiting your intranet.

so if you know of any solutions to these two issues, or have a kick ass intranet please let me know in the comments section.

Dorje

Lyttelton recover

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:19:00 +0000

The article online

The first of a couple of personal blog posts just prior to heading over to speaking at Intranets 2012 in Sydney next week.

I live in Lyttelton, New Zealand. We've had a bit of a rough time recently, but because of the wonderful people who live here I love being part of the Whakaraupo (Lyttelton) basin.
One of the great characters around our town (even though he lives around the corner in Red Cliffs) is Aaron Tokona.

Since the earthquakes I've been lucky enough to catch up with Aaron at two local social events, where he shared his love through his skills as a musician and show man. In both cases he went beyond the call of duty because of his personal relationship to the people who were having the events and the community.

The impetus for this post was an article in a local magazine Avenues, that interviewed Aaron. What really stood out to me was how Aaron's personality came through in the article.

To me Aaron embodies being true to your calling. Personally and professionally I believe this is an essential part of life, and something I work to achieve, with varying degrees of success.

Heading to Intranets 2012 next week is part of my doing the thing I think I can make a difference in. My professional whanau (Maori word for extended family) will be really well represented, I'll learn a huge amount and hopefully I'll be able to pass on some of what I've learnt too.

Taking Aaron's closing comment

I'm looking forward to bringing a little bit of Otautahi Mean! to Sydney next week.

Value of leadership and paradox

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 03 May 2011 01:54:00 +0000

Working as I do at a University I sometimes get the chance to see speakers I'd otherwise only find in the virtual world.

An hour ago I was able to see Sir Paul Callaghan (New Zealander of the year 2011) speak on his vision for how New Zealand could have it's cake and eat it too by looking at where we as a nation want to be "as rich as the Aussies" and then thinking smart about how that can be achieved within the constraints that we have as New Zealanders.

But what does it have to do with intranets ?

To me Sir Paul's talk, which was very similar to the one I've included above, reminded me that the key to success for any venture requires:

Having a vision
Providing leadership
Knowing your landscape
An ability to take the road of the statesman rather than that of the politician

Intranets as we all know are tricky beasts to do well. We can any one of us throw up a few pages of how to, and move the refernce documents from the file server onto the intranet. But adding organisational value takes quite a lot more.

Paradox is how Sir Paul brings these key aspects required for success togeather using examples of Abraham Lincoln resolving the American Civil war, the Wizard of Oz and Jane Austin. As intranet professionals it is our professional duty to be able to do this within our own organisations.

Sir Paul's talk reminded me that with my Intranet hat on

Wpending time with users, at all levels within my organisation is valuable.
Helping all staff understand that the simplest thing (sending an email) isn't necessarily the best thing to do.
Providing everyone with your dream for what the intranet could be, and the stepping stones along the way to reaching that vision is invaluable.
Saying no to some requests rather than letting the loudest ideas become those that are undertaken.
Walking the walk, by being the very best you can be and not contradicting yourself through words or actions.

Comment and let us all know the things that remind you how to be the best intranet professional you can be.

Dorje

Viral video intranet style!

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:37:00 +0000

Well here we are then , long time no see.
Yep back in the saddle after ten months, two earthquakes, my boy starting school and just the hint of work. Nothing big really.

Are you keen on getting your intranet videos to go viral ?

Surely you jest I hear readers from intranet land ask. But no I'm serious.
I've been listening to a pod cast since starting my new job at a local university, the 45 minute commute each way pushed me over the edge. IT conversations has a terrible website, so don't bother thinking it might lead the way to cool intranet innovation, which does exist. What IT conversations has in spades is serendipity and liberal interpretation of what IT is.

If any of you have read Carmine Gallo's the innovation secrets of Steve Jobs, or heard his interview on IT conversations, you'll know why serendipity and broadening your horizon's can be valuable. Suffice to say looking over the fence into other IT areas, or out the window and into another person's world can work wonders for your intranet.

[Tip if you're after a great book resource, free shipping to New Zealand, and exceptional prices I'd recommend http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ a friend of my partner's put us on to them and we haven't been able to justify buying anywhere else, other than our local London Street books]

But hang on what about Viral video on my intranet !
You said! you promised!

OK so here it is, a viral video case study and how it applies to your intranet.

Executive summary for those in a hurry:

it needs to be SHORT
vary the image that you use to advertise it, to appeal to all the audiences you care about using your intranet
make it visible, this may even heaven forbid, mean printing it out and putting it up in the tea room with a suitably cryptic title.
[ if you're lucky enough to have a smart phone toting staff demographic put up a QR code and see what happens. The flattr guys talk about blurring the real and virtual using QR codes.]
make it easy to share . . . . .
No seriously even if it is as little as a MailTo href link or the equivalent of the share button under every YouTube video, that gives users a simple URL they can copy and paste.
leak it don't blast it. Depending on your organisation's culture (which you know because you're the intranet person . . . . right ?) tell the cool folks, the influencers or the gossips a day or two in advance of the home page news item. They'll appreciate the chance to show off an you'll get a BUZZ going prior to go live. Don't forget to mix it up with a different title and image on release day so you get the folks who meant to click on it but just didn't get around to it yet.
plan for and record metrics, where appropriate make them visible to your users.
This will be one of the corner stones of justifying the time and effort you've put into getting your intranet video to go viral within your organisation.

Finally : Have a plan. Too often I've seen intranet managers have an idea they think would be cool, or some tool/technology etc they want to use and then come up with a project that suits it. Sit down first and decide how you're going to put a dent in the universe within your organisation. If a viral video is the right tool for making that dent then go for it. If it isn't, smile and move on you've broadened your horizons by reading this far.

What about that that viral video case study ? I want the real oil, it want detail I hear you cry.
Well here I have to come clean, while many intranets use video I've never heard of one where there was even an attempt to make one go viral. Not documented publicly anyway. What I do have is how a video, that I have some knowledge of, went viral and how that experience informed my executive summary above. If you've got an intranet case study that you're willing to share guest blog it here, or send me the link and I'll get the word out.

CASE Study - Mels hidden talent
By 18 April 8:46pm NZ time this video had :

207 Google links to this video from other sites
382 Yahool links to this video from other sites
On YouTube 1,212,040 views , 13207 likes , 252 dislikes , 13459 ratings, 4251 comments and 6431 favorites in 5 days (13 Apr - 18 Apr 2011)
Oldest tweet is 14 April. 4 of first 30 tweeters have 7500 followers, the other 26 have approximately 100 each

The key aspects of this case study are when the video was posted (13 Apr 2011 US time), where it was re-posted (reddit.com, mashable.com, YouTube home page, huffingtonpost.com), and who re-posted it on each site.

Time line

Video posted to YouTube 13 April 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcVFM4X7OSg
It appears on Redditmedia.com (reddit’s distribution website for reddit.com)
then to
joemonster.org (Polish site for boys, polish FHM equivalent) 162 comments 3:30pm NZDT 18/apr
http://www.joemonster.org/filmy/34437/Nasladowanie_glosow_zwierzat
then on to
Mashable Posted on a Thursday
http://mashable.com/2011/04/14/youtube-animal-impression/ (35 comments 3:30pm NZDT 18/apr)
by http://mashable.com/author/brenna-ehrlich/ who is a senior staff member at Mashable.
Then on to the
YouTube home page
http://www.youtube.com/
where even at 3:30pm NZDT 18/apr Mel’s hidden talent is the second link under three of the Recommended for you highlights.
Then Reddit appears, though in the YouTube listing
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/gq23x/a_girl_i_went_to_highschool_with_makes_animal/
But when you look at this listing the first of the 993 comments was posted “3 days ago” probably the day after the video went on to YouTube.
Posted by
http://www.reddit.com/user/khinigeetaht 1545 link karma / 129 comment karma
First comment was by
http://www.reddit.com/user/feb192011 7 link karma / 3263 comment karma
Then the next day on to
The HuffingtonPost http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/girl-animal-noises-video_n_849711.html at 12:29pm ET on 15 Apr
They have 67 comments on their page
then to YouTube.com/videos
http://www.youtube.com/videos where it is no longer highlighted
then to
A Vietnamese site http://dantri.com.vn/c728/s728-473416/co-gai-lam-nao-loan-youtube-vi-gia-tieng-dong-vat.htm

How does this compare with other viral videos ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI
Took off after HuffintonPost mention
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IReU3XaRC5c
Took off after Mashable mention

Summary
No matter the size of your organisation, or even if most people have speakers on their PCs you can make use of what we've learnt here:
First - make sure you've spent time on a video that puts a dent in your organisation's universe. By this I mean make sure it serves a purpose which furthers the goals of your organisation, or at least the key staff within it.
Second - the topic may be dull, but the delivery should be fun and or intriguing to get the viral buzz.
Third - spread your sights. If no one in your organisation has speakers, do a silent video (21 million views can't be wrong. . . . or is it ?)
Fourth - get the word out to the people who are the influencers, gossips and leaders in your organisation. With them onboard the viral bit begins.

References not otherwise linked to:
http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/
http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/24/follow-up-to-the-viral-video-post-dan-wants-another-word/
http://www.dan.ag/
http://www.sharethrough.com/

IBF24 Yammer and Sungard

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:38:00 +0000

I've just been got on to the IBF24 intranets live event and the very first thing I find is David Sachs - Yammer founder - citing my old stomping ground SunGard and how Cris Conde appreciated the organisation flattening value in Yammer.

I am lucky enough to have benefited directly from Yammer putting me directly in touch with Chris despite being about 10 managers seperated from him in the Org structure when I was working for SunGard.
His comments directly to staff made a huge difference to the culture of the organisation - one of the really very valuable aspects of tools like Yammer.

Who says serendipity doesn't play a part in the world ? :-)

More on the benefits of Yammer I've previously posted

2010 IBF intranets 24

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:41:00 +0000

I've been asked to present a Live Intranet tour for the Intranet Benchmarking Forum's 24 hour event in a couple of days.

I've blogged about the IBF intranet's live online meetings previsously, this time I'll be presenting for their second (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) Intranets 24 hour event. Over the span of 24 hours the IBF team will be hosting a huge number of world leading intranet live tours and a large number of intranet thought leaders.

Interestingly they've adopted the "digital workplace" as a sub title for the event. This is a theme of web workplace or digital workplace was originally raised by Jane McConnell on her blog Globally Local and Locally Global. It is great to see because the term intranet is so far from the reality for many organisations in this day and age.

Attendance is FREE and I'd highly recommend anyone with an interest in intranets attend.

It is on 2nd and 3rd of June so SOON.

For your free ticket to attend you do have to let IBF know about the role you play within your organisation as far as the intranet goes but it isn't too detailed or onerous.
To do so go to
http://www.ibforum.com/?ibf24what

then click the "online now" link

then click register

Fill in the details to register your attendance

The programme
As I live in New Zealand I've translated the programme into NZ times.

From Noon London time on Tuesday (11pm NZ time on Wednesday the 2nd) the 24hr round the world intranet event begins.

You can dip in and out as you see fit.
http://www.ibforum.com/?ibf24who

The British Telecom (Mark Morrell) intranet will be very interesting Between 11pm Wednesday the 2nd and 5am Wed the 3rd NZ time.

5am - 11am Thursday 3rd NZ time - US Nokia intranet (Angela Hoffman talking through changes since I last blogged about Nokia's intranet), Steve Krug - "don't make me think" author

11am - 5pm Thursday 3rd NZ time - US east coast intranets

4pm - 8pm Thursday 3rd NZ time - Australia / New Zealand intranets - I'll be presenting the Lincoln Univeristy live intranet tour

8pm - 11pm Thursday 3rd NZ time - Aviva , British Airways and BBC intranet tours.

I hope some of you attend.
I've seen many of these intranets and they provide great inspiration for those of you out there making your web workplaces better.