One of the projects that we designed and delivered has been just announced as one of the best ten Intranets on the Nielsen Norman Group's "Intranet Design Annual 2008: Year's Ten Best Intranets".

The report can be downloaded from Nielsen Norman group web site.

The 10 winning intranets featured in the report are:

Bank of America, United States
Bankinter S.A., Spain
Barnes & Noble, United States
British Airways, United Kingdom
Campbell Soup Company, United States
Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation, United States
IKEA North America Service, LLC, United States
Ministry of Transport, New Zealand (Built with MOSS!!)
New South Wales, Department of Primary Industries, Australia
SAP AG, Germany

Last April at the Wellington SharePoint User Group I did a session with Ari showcasing this Intranet solution in Phase 1 and highlighted how we used content types and tagging to drive the Intranet's core navigation.

Currently the Ministry of Transport is into Phase 3 of a their enterprise content management strategy and are implementing Records and Document management by extending on the core MOSS features.

The Intranet has also won numerous local awards including the Microsoft Partner Award of the Year at New Zealand Microsoft Partner Awards.

Here are some screen shots and a solution overview of the Intranet that I am allowed to Share. :-)

Each site’s homepage contains listings of relevant content drawn from within the current section and/or subsections of the Intranet. To do this we made heavy use of the Data View Web Part. Using SharePoint designer we simply added several Data View Web Parts to each page, and selected the relevant list or library that contained the content. As the Data View Web Part contains a XSL template, our designers were easily able to customise this to provide a rich user interface as shown below:

The homepage for the Intranet, drawing content from several sections of the Intranet:

The “Have your say!” voting poll was designed using the OOTB “Survey” list and integration of Silverlight 1.0 to display interactive graphs. The results are displayed in a custom web part and ASPX control.

Tag clouds

As an alternative to displaying the most recent or popular content for sections of the site that had large amounts of content we used the “Tools and Resources” homepage to display tag clouds to provide access ways into the site. To accomplish this we created a component that would calculate the tag counts every time content was updated, and a page layout that contained several Data View Web Parts to display these tags.

The tag counting component was implemented as a List Event Receiver that fires every time content is added, updated or deleted within the site. This looks at the metadata lists we created in step 1, and runs CAML queries over the content to count the number of times each tag appears. It then stores the results in copies of the metadata lists within the specific sub site. The Data View Web Parts on the site’s homepage can then reference the metadata lists within the sub site to display the tags and related counts for each metadata attribute. This meant that the totals were not calculated ‘on-the-fly’, speeding up page load time dramatically, but does mean that the totals may not be accurate if items are checked out (and therefore not visible) to particular users. To reduce the impact of this we run the calculation process with elevated privileges and let users know that the counts may be higher than the number of items they see if they do not have permission to see these items.

Paper prototype of conceptual model: (Read Zef's blog on how we use these in our projects)

Final Outcome

Tag-Based Navigation

The metadata lists used for the tag clouds are also used to drive the navigation for sections of the site. Selecting an item in the menu takes the user to a filtered view of the content in the site that the user can then sort or filter further to help find the content they are looking for. This dynamic view of the content means users are not forced to go down a single path to find content, as is the case with tree based navigation structures. Users have the ability to filter by the attributes they feel will return the content they are after. This also has an advantage over search, as users easily sort and filter results with more control.

Related Tags

Each content page on the site contains a related tags section that looks at the metadata attributes for the page and displays each item as a link to search results for a similar item. To achieve this we built a custom ASP.NET user control that we put on each page layout

Search Implementation

Prior to deploying SharePoint the Ministry had no effective way of searching content. Like many SharePoint implementations, the search functionality was a major draw card, so it was important that we got it right. To this end we followed a fairly standard search configuration with a few useful techniques employed to add value.

The search setup consists of 3 different content sources. Each source represents a very different type of content which is indicated as follows:

• Intranet sites (SharePoint sites)
• Public web site (Web sites)
• External Contacts (Business data)

To allow effective searching over the content it has been split up into the following 5 scopes:

• All Sites (searches over all content)
• Intranet (only searches the Intranet)
• Public Web (only searches the public web site)
• People (searches user profiles)
• External Contacts (searches Active Directory contacts)

Zac did most of the Search implementation and should have a blog post on his wicked BDC implementation at some stage.