Article on CIO.com: Nine Mistakes That Turn Your Corporate Intranet into a Ghost Town

A good article on common mistakes that keeps your employees away from your intranet, by Martin Amm (CEO and one of the founders of adenin TECHNOLOGIES:

1)Assuming a one-size-fits-all home page will meet everyone’s needs.
Give the users news that is for specifically for them.

2)Creating a one-way communication platform.
Make it easy for users to publish information.

3)Delaying deployment until absolutely every department’s requirements are met.
Start deploying it in phases, make sure the first phase shows the power of the tool to a lot of users.

4)Having multiple sign-ons.
Build a corporate intranet that serves as a bridge, a single point of information.

5)Downplaying the importance of integration.
Tight integration with backend systems is critical for company strategists.

6)Overlooking the importance of workflows.
Business Processes can make your life easier, make you do your work faster and correcter.

7)Dismissing Web 2.0’s role in the enterprise.
Make your intranet a giant collaboration platform and meeting space.

8)Designing the intranet in an IT ivory tower.
Be sure to attract a lot of key users to provide a great intranet for all users.

9)Minimizing the importance of robust search.
The last one, but definitely one of the more important ones!

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.