[Sigia-l] Employee page on your intranet

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hi there,

On 8/2/06, prady <pradyotrai at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to hear your ideas on how to build employee pages on the
> intranet. I am looking for new & innovative ideas on how to avoid
> building static pages, lack of proper controls and overhead of
> managing them. I am wondering if we can avoid the trap of building
> "talent databases", managed by "HR" folks, to get the same result.

We're doing this through an enterprise Wiki called Confluence, with
some customised plugin work that taps into an Oracle database (a
legacy database we still have to use). The Wiki works as an interface
to the database. First, since this is an enterprise Wiki, all
employees have an account in it (automatic) and their profile page has
two views ; by yourself (interface to the database) and everybody else
(a view of this info only). Anywhere in the Wiki your name gets
attached to content you produce (news, pages, docs, comments, etc).
Your profile is also a small Wiki space in itself where you can put in
any text you like in addition to the database driven stuff.

As to what goes there that might be interesting to the rest of the
organisation, there's a small guideline to what you might say (and a
template to boot if you feel you want one) where you put in what you
do, what you'd like to do, how you can help others, and so forth.

> Any body worked on this area before? Is this an IA problem, or something else?

10% IA, 10%UX, 20% technology, 20% brevity, 30% anti-methodology, 10% coolness.

> I want to explore if anyone is using search engines to "profile"
> employees, and build dynamic page. If so, I want to understand how you
> build "texonomies" and "topics" for search indexing(?)

Our old system uses search as part of "looking for content by person
X", and which is also why we're running in the other direction and
taking rather large steps to make sure that one system has some degree
of control over the intranet. The system has tagging (which we use for
both facetted navigation, search and categorisation), comments (when
editing the page seems daunting), uses blogging everywhere (sub-Wiki's
have automatic blogs, people have blogs, and aggregation is built into
the system to repurpose this stuff everywhere), email alerts,
bookmarks, and so many plugins and implementation option to make any
geek froth at the mouth in joy.

Having said all this, the interface is out-of-the-box very geek
friendly, which means I spend a *lot* of time making it fit for normal
human use. Your milage will vary.


Regards,

Alex
-- 
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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