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?