Where are the SharePoint solutions in Nielsen Norman Group's “10 Best Intranets” for 2012?

Insights for the SharePoint community in Nielsen Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual 2012

Earlier this month, Nielsen Norman Group released their annual list of the 10 best intranets. In recent years, at least half of the winners featured solutions built on SharePoint. This year, the Intranet Design Annual 2012 includes only 3 intranets based on SharePoint, though an additional two companies use SharePoint for team collaboration. So, what's going on?

From what I can tell, the selection of the technology platform for the winning intranets seems to have been associated more with vendor or platform history and relationships rather than a comprehensive technology platform search. I think this makes sense - all of the winning intranets have very custom branding and features, which means technology familiarity is critical for both development and maintenance. A good vendor relationship also helps when you are tailoring a platform to meet your company needs. That said, there were a few teams who indicated that they wish they had done a more thorough platform selection process - to better match requirements and outcomes to the technology platform.

The three companies who used SharePoint as their intranet platform seemed to have selected SharePoint because of their comfort with the Microsoft technology stack and heavy investment in Microsoft products - all good reasons. There are an additional two companies that did not use SharePoint for their intranet but are using SharePoint for team and local collaboration and are integrating SharePoint content in their intranet search results. These companies seem to recognize SharePoint's value for supporting team and group collaboration but selected alternative, non-Microsoft technologies for their intranet content management systems.

None of the three SharePoint-based winning intranets use FAST for search - they are all using "out of the box" SharePoint search (though one supplements content classification with Concept Searching). All of the winning intranet teams invested a lot of time building and testing their information architectures - validating that independent of the technology platform, "findability" is a critical factor for successful intranets. In addition, all of the winning intranets have a highly customized look and feel, so there was clearly an emphasis on making content look good as well as findable.

Another interesting take-away for me is that each of the award winning intranet teams has documented a set of roles and responsibilities as part of their governance plan. It's not clear whether they each have documented content and design governance plans, which are also very important, but it's nice to see that governance is getting the priority that it should in these award-winning intranets.

Of the 10 winning intranets, the business owner for 8 of the intranets is some variation of Marketing and/or Communications. The other two are owned by IT, which typically raises a red flag for me. However, in one case, the head of the intranet steering committee is the Chief People Officer (HR) and in the other, the owner is really Human Resources IT so I think that there appears to be good business sponsorship for all 10 of the winning intranets.

There doesn't really seem to be any technical reason why more of the "best intranets of 2012" couldn't have been based on SharePoint. There are some excellent insights for SharePoint intranet designers in this report. Hopefully, we'll see more SharePoint solutions featured among the best intranets of 2013!

• Collaboration
• Collaboration/Web 2.0
• intranet
• Intranet Design
• SharePoint