Publishing information to your intranet

Centralized publishing
First, let's look at the positive side of centralization. Charging a group of people—either centrally or by department or area—with the responsibility for publishing all content can help control the type, quality, and format of information that populates your corporate intranet. You'll be able to reliably enforce corporate styles—the look and feel of the documents—and rest secure that only "approved" information will make its way online.

Uniform style makes for easier retrieval of information. In addition, by guaranteeing that someone checks all information for accuracy before publishing it, you help ensure that intranet content will be reliable, and reliable content increases the likelihood that users will actually make the intranet their first place to look for information.

The downside of centralization is that, by appointing one or more specific people to publish all material, you build a bottleneck into the publication process. In most organizations, people who are assigned to publish intranet content have other jobs that are at least as important as publishing. Their need to tend to other tasks will slow down publication.

Also, unless you pick your most knowledgeable people—the ones who should probably be spending as much of their time as possible producing for the organization—the employees that you charge with intranet publishing will need to verify the accuracy of a lot of the information they post, thus slowing the process even further.

Finally, you will need to work out a procedure for determining the priority of information to be published. Unless a high proportion of your company's most critical information makes it onto the intranet in the first phase of deployment, users will quickly become disenchanted and stop looking to the intranet for the information they need.

Are you willing to pay one or more people to be dedicated intranet publishers? To do nothing but learn about, document, convert to your intranet standard format, and publish to the intranet information for others in the corporation to use?

If so, centralized publishing is the method for you.

Before you choose this method, though, consider the story of one prospect who came to us looking for an intranet solution. When he called to thank us for our demonstration, he said, "When I got back to the office, our technical people were having a champagne toast to celebrate the bringing up of another Web page on our intranet."

Since champagne parties are usually reserved for special occasions, the implication was that the release of a new site on this company's intranet was a rare event.

Fortunately, intranet publishing doesn't have to take forever, even if you decide on centralized publishing. The Enlighten.Net intranet solution lets you add as many documents, pages, or sites as you like, whenever you like.

Decentralized publishing
When you allow all (or, at least, many) employees to publish content that is relevant to them, information gets published much more quickly. Each employee can "share" the information they have and publish information in the areas in which they are the experts.

More publishers generate more information, more quickly—and that, in turn, generates more buy-in from the workforce as a whole.

There are some downsides to this approach, but they are not difficult to address. The first is that you may lose control over the look and feel of the documents. This only becomes critical if the different formats make it difficult to retrieve information quickly. Luckily, you can address this problem quite simply by specifying the use of templates or creating guidelines for different types of documents.

The second problem with decentralized publishing is the increased need for quality control on the information. If any user can post, and some post incorrect information, end-users may wind up making decisions or answering questions on the basis of bad information. Again, it is possible to address this issue systematically by, for example, creating review processes for published materials.

Choosing a publishing philosophy...and learning the territory
Publishing a document to most intranets is like reading a road map. If you know already the area, it isn't too bad. But if you are new in town, it is confusing, frustrating, and may not get you where you want to go the first time.

Whether you centralize your intranet publishing or allow each user to publish, you will need to pay some attention to establishing a directory structure—a road map to your corporate knowledge.

In most intranets, whoever publishes a document must create the content and determine where on the network it should go, that is, on which server and in which directory. Then, they need to know how to insert links into other documents to the new one. This process can be time-consuming and require specialized knowledge of the intranet's directory structure, as well as HTML coding skills. That's because most intranet servers use virtual directories, so the URL shown in the browser has little bearing on where a file actually resides on the server.

If you'd rather have your employees doing their normal jobs, rather than memorizing your intranet file structure or generating hyperlinks, you'll appreciate our Enlighten.Net intranet solution. It has the flexibility to fit whichever corporate publishing philosophy you espouse—you decide who publishes and who doesn't—and, in addition, it gives people a drag-and-drop way to publish that couldn't be simpler. It also automates link creation, with no HTML knowledge required.

Your technical staff probably already knows how to post documents to an intranet the traditional way. But wait until they see this. They'll love not having to spend their time answering questions from sales people on how to create a link to your suppliers' Web sites, or how to link the agenda for next week's meeting to the departmental home page.

So pick the intranet publishing philosophy that best suits your organization—and then come to Enlighten.Net for the combination of flexibility and power that will make your intranet a success.