Today I attended a unique forum that allowed one to see different intranets and listen to the strategies behind them. The UKeiG forums have been going on for a little while, and as I have been trying to attend one for almost a year, I can attest that they are very popular. There was a range of experience (me at the lower end…) and areas (academic, research, charity, entrepreneurial) on display.
Imperial College‘s new portal for students is fully customisable and aims to make finding information online much more convenient for students. The ‘preset’ version has a TFL Service Updates widget (showing which tube lines are on time or delayed) and tabs with links to the Library and Student Resources. Students are encouraged to collaborate with a link to Facebook front and centre. David and his team have done an admirable job of being thorough and involving the students with this.
Janet Corcoran showed us a nicely organised intranet for the 150 library staff at Imperial College (scattered across 3 campuses and a few hospitals). Their goal was to get their documentation, meeting minutes and important information shareable and onto a wiki that can be edited by all, rather than static and difficult to find on folders (why can’t we do that).
Cancer Research UK needs to support 40,000 staff in various locations and so has an appropriately large intranet–full of all the forms, policy & procedures documents, and handy details that one could ever need. The fact that they have devolved control for uploading and editing content to 100 staff members allows the intranet to stay current and interesting. Previously, their single content manager proved to be a bit of a bottleneck in their system. The future will see more developments that will make this portal even more powerful.
And finally Oneis presented a very shiny and new hosted information management system. Their target audience is smaller organisations (5 to 50 employees) such as consultants or researchers. Their system looks user-friendly and flexible, allowing very finely-defined levels of access to different people. Also, one search brings up documents, people, images or presentations. Definitely one to watch.
Because portals are usually hidden behind a password or IP authentication, it’s a worthwhile activity to ‘air’ them once in a while (I wish mine were forum-worthy). Thank you to Janet Corcoran and Karen Blakeman for organising an interesting afternoon.
(the) health informaticist 