Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Issues and Looking Forward with Law Intranets

Long story short: there is a burgeoning law intranet co-ordinators' interest group in Toronto which met for the first time last week. I attended and took a few notes which I thought others might be interested in.

Issues currently of concern with intranets:
  • search
  • archiving information (what is being archived, how it is being archived, and what is deleted)
  • providing better access to precedents
  • information is too static (not being updated frequently enough)
  • intranet is not being used
  • making the site bilingual for some firms
  • governance issues - who "owns" the intranet
  • security
  • usage measurement, and what to do with the usage stats that people are collecting
  • connectivity between content management system and the document management system
  • connectivity between the intranet and the document management system
Projects people are anticipating looking forward:
  • addition of news feeds
  • adding content (especially dynamic content)
  • incorporating RSS feeds
  • use of wikis
Even further in the future:
  • has the intranet had its time and will federated search replace the need?
  • evolving into a self-service model, for example folksonomies (tagging) rather than taxonomies
  • Microsoft has a lot of tools for "on the fly" collaborative work spaces that would promote the self-service model
Topics for discussion at future meetings:
  • who are content publishers?
  • governance
  • what is the workflow and process in each organization?
  • what do you archive, and what do you delete?
  • training issues
  • which firms have web developers or coders on staff? Are there issues around this?
  • how people use the intranet?
  • how are people using blogs and wikis?
  • how to push information to people without email
  • delivering content via RSS feeds
  • issues around providing service to multiple offices
  • how people use intranets for current awareness service
Lots of interesting thoughts for consideration. Are there any similar groups meeting elsewhere?

2 comments:

Heather said...

Wow! I wish I was in Toronto! No chance of putting together such a group here but it's dead on with the things I'm regularly mulling about in my little head. I look forward to reading any tidbits from the meetings that make it into some postings.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a great group to get together. I am certainly familiar with many of those challenges! Please be sure to post again with more results from your group meetings!