Sharepoint, Internal Communications and Saying "No"

I went to an excellent workshop session today on Sharepoint presented by Sam Marshall from ClearBox Consulting so would like to share some of the ideas Sam presented and reflect on what I gained from the day.

Analogies first - is your staff intranet a market, a plush shopping mall or a superstore? Do you want highly structured order, or a vibrant range of tools and options? Sam presented his work on The Digital Workplace Maturity Model and made us think through where we already are on the model and where we wanted to be. Of course we all think we want to excel on all four of his dimensions:

• Communication and information 
• Community and collaboration
• Services
• Structure

...but we don't have the resource to do this, so by working through plotting all the features we want on an Ease-of-implementation vs Value-to-users matrix we can start to identify what is achievable quickly and easily and what requires significantly more investment. We are talking about replacing our aged, current staff intranet, staffcentral, with Sharepoint. So things like prioritising and presenting news are relatively easy, things like blogs from the senior management team are much harder to achieve because of culture change issues.

Sam also played us this short 'Sharepoint in Plain English' YouTube clip, commissioned by Microsoft. It's simplistic (and cringey!) but probably a good start for people who have no idea what you're on about and can't see what's wrong with your current website solution...

For me, as an IT development person, one of the hardest things I find is to say "no" to the staff and students we offer a service to. In technology, subject to resource, the answer is usually "yes - we can build it". But when planning an Intranet and thinking through communications, sometimes the answer has to be no, in order to have a consistent and efficient communication strategy:

Yes, I could build you a shiny site in the content management system of your choice with 57 different social networking options - but No, I'm not going to, because then your content will be on an island separate to everything else we do, nobody will find it and you won't be eligible for central support or have your news propagated to the rest of the University.

Working with our colleagues in Marketing and Communications we should be able to achieve the right balance of providing and supporting the right tools, distributing the right quantity and balance of news and events. Watch this space.

What your iPhone Home Screen says about you - not a lot!

Today the family was around for lunch, which resulted in three iPhones in the house - mine, my husbands and my brother-in-laws. Which got me pondering if someone would be able to tell whose was who's by looking at the home screens:

  

What do you think? Which one is me? I'm the third one, but I'm not sure you could tell unless you knew I liked word games and travelled by train regularly. I wondered if at a basic level you could spot gender or connectedness just from home screen app selections.

I put out a call on Twitter and Facebook and gathered a dozen more examples (full set embedded in the slideshow below if you are interested). I'm not sure I can deduce anything about gender/interests etc from this small set, but here are some observations:

• Most people have phone and email on the bottom (shared) row
• Most people have the settings app on their home page
• Several people wanted to share their second screen as they felt that was where their personality came through - the home screen is just the 'boring apps' they use most often
• Nobody has 'messages' (SMS/MMS) on the bottom row unless it was in a folder along with phone, Email seems a much preferred messaging platform for my sample
• Everybody has iPod (or Music for iPod users) on their home screen. Apart from me.
• We all love our connected services - Twitter and/or Facebook highly prominent for everyone. Although given my method of capturing these images this is not at all surprising! 

A special mention goes to this home screen as the most categorised of them all. One page, all folders apart from a camera app:

So, in summary, I'm not sure you can tell much about people from their iPhone home screens - or rather, we all use the same basic set of apps. Would love to see some screens from non-twitter/Facebook users - but suspect there wouldn't be much difference. If you find some out there in the wild, please send them in and I'll add them to the collection and see if there is any secret psychology out there!

Doing a Google on studentcentral

One of the aspects of my job that makes me smile is by recognising special events by changing our student learning environment (studentcentral) login page graphics - 'doing a google'.

I've started collecting these customisations together as a slideshow, and here it is:



Next week is 'Green Week' and I have a suitable theme planned!