[Sigia-l] Personalization in enterprise IA project

[Piet Kopka]

Hi,

although this is in some kind very near to the current thread "General 
access versus members-only sites" i decided to post it as a new one.

I´m working on the early stage of an intranet project with the goal to give 
users (employees) of an highly distributed company a unified interface to 
content and applications. Company strategy is to get the users to feel like 
being part of the whole as their actual intranet is a collection of totally 
individual intranet websites with little corporate branding.

All content will be available mainly across deep, semantical linked, 
topical  structures. This is part of solving the problem of content being 
hided in deep organisational structures.

Now the challenge i´m currently struggling with.

At which point (granularity) group personalization should be implemented? 
(With "Group personalization" i mean personalization for employees of a 
business unit etc.)

Global and local content are mixing at some (many) points of topical 
structure. This happens in two different ways. Local content extends global 
content and local content overwrites global content. This happens in nearly 
every granularity of the structure.

We will be using a CMS, so personalisation of even single words of a 
paragraph should theoretically not be an issue. But it would make authoring 
and workflow probably highly complicated. If we allow manually changing of 
user focus, the changes of the content would be not very transparent, 
because tagging of local content in this granularity would be not very 
useful.

Another, more pragmatically way would be to give out all global structure 
and content for all users and link to additional/overwriting local content. 
This would be one more click and the risk of redundant content in the case 
of overwriting local content. On the other hand, the border between global 
and local content is quite obvious for users and authors.

Has someone tried one of this tactics, or another one in a similar project?

(I tried my best to write as clear as possible. But take into account that 
english is not my natural language. Thank you.)

Piet