| Uniformity and Standardization |
All For One, And One For All
When you walk around a corporate office you expect a certain obvious characteristic - design uniformity. The carpeting, wall color, cubicle partitions, and furniture look the same or are consistent with a recognizable design theme.
Similarly, your corporate intranet/extranet should act as a portal that enables users to access the various internal sub-sites. And as a portal, there needs to be an overall sense of unity. One of the main goals of most corporate intranets is to consolidate all the internal sub-sites into a single, top-level portal.
Unfortunately we have seen too many organizations use their portal as merely a link launching pad for independent sites with added document management and search, instead of merging all of these sites into a singular environment.
The Corporate Central SaaS Portal, like the other products in the Unified Enterprise Suite™ is a well engineered solution that solves real word problems that no other competing products address effectively. And one of the main areas we concentrate in the design and implementation of the Corporate Central SaaS Portal as a tool for establishing Uniformity and Standardization.
Standardization of multiple sites depends on the size of each individual component, the corporate intranet vision, and the basic business requirements of the company. But in order to successfully combine all these diverse sub-sites into one cohesive, unified portal, you need to:
- Make use of common resources
- Implement a single sign on solution
- Implement a consistent navigational system
- Agree upon a single corporate intranet brand
- Actively enforce the intranet standards
The Corporate Central SaaS Portal and the Unified Enterprise Database™ provide the tools and lay the groundwork to accomplish all of the above.
Common Resources
The Corporate Central SaaS Portal and the Unified Enterprise Database™ provide the following facilities and services to enable effective use of common resources:
- Single Sign On integration with Enterprise User Management
- Centralized Personalization
- Unified Web Applications Directory
- Unified Workflow Engine
- Corporate Group Calendars Directory and Events database including calendar Events, Appointments and Tasks
- Consistent look and feel branding guidelines
- When implemented with Tracker TRM™ the database architecture consolidates corporate wide data including: Companies, Contacts, Activities, Addresses, Phone Numbers, E-Mail addresses and company and contact roles. This is accomplished by having systems either user the Unified Enterprise Database™ natively for reading and updating data, or by replicating or synchronizing data from the various database to flow into Unified Enterprise Database™.
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Consistent Navigation
Your intranet/extranet navigational structure is the primary mechanism that enables a user to navigate and locate specific information and applications—it allows them to get from one point to the next without forcing them to wander around. It is critical that complete full featured web applications be hosted and accessible from within the portal and not merely be launched by a portal.
The most commonly found problem with large multi-owner intranets is the "floating menu" — menus that appear in different locations from one site to the next. If users expect to see a left-hand sided dropdown menu, it's crucial to keep this consistent throughout and not change it to a static menu that shuffles its way to the right somewhere between Point A and Point B.
The content of the menu options may be different depending on the department or discipline, but the design and layout must be the same—menu consistency and location are crucial.
It's also worthwhile to mention that sub-sites with similar menu options should be:
- Labeled in the same manner as the others
- Listed in the same order
Portal Branding
Individual sub-sites under the umbrella of a corporate intranet need to share the same brand. It can mirror the corporate image or, better yet, it can be a uniquely designed brand that's easily identifiable as the intranet's ‘look’.
The goal here is to maintain a uniform portal brand that promotes instant recognition—so that users can take one look, regardless of which sub-site they're in, and say, "Yes, this is part of the same site."
As the user navigates their way through each web application, they should notice a uniformity of design and navigation. Users will notice how similar colors are used along with the logo to identify each sub-site as a member of the larger portal network. Meanwhile, each site can contain a unique logo that makes it easy for users to identify the site they're in. Software Progressions Corporation uses a variant of the same branding strategy with our logo and our specific product offerings.
By maintaining a single consistent design, the process of site-wide updating will also be greatly simplified and can even be automated with the use of scripts that can modify the entire site in one pass. If every department maintained their own standard, each branch would need to be manually updated.
Standards Enforcement
The longer an intranet exists, the easier it will be for one or multiple sub-sites to drift away for the corporate intranet standard so it's important to actively enforce them.
There are two main ways to ensure that your corporate intranet doesn't stray too far over time:
- Appoint a nonpartisan Corporate Central SaaS Portal manager: site design and standards need to be agreed upon by all sub-site owners wishing to be a member of the corporate intranet. However, the enforcement of standards should be left up to an independent intranet manager and not one of the sub-site owners.
- Provide sub-site owners with all the necessary information about integrating the Corporate Central SaaS Portal as well as templates, style sheets (CSS), and predefined guidelines including standard in terms of headings, fonts, banners, layout, and graphics.
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