realDesign: Design Stories About the Real - world/teams/products/users

Did you know that your intra net portal has stages of maturity? It does! Based on a multitude of primary and secondary sources of research Avenue A | Razorfish  has published a model for how a corporate intranet matures.  Some of these will likely be familiar to you

• Stage 1: Homegrown set of  HTML pages that allow for easy sharing of information, often at the departmental or group level.
  
• Stage 2: The intranet portal in this stage has evolved into a company wide entity and uses technologies like ERP to enable self service of HR and Finance systems
• Stage 3: While they include the information sharing and self service aspects of the first two stages, these third stage portals highlight collaboration tools. Companies with a large proportion of knowledge workers are most likley to invest in collaboration or stage three intranets
• Stage 4: These intranets meet the needs of all users by deftly aggregating and prioritizing information based on the role, group, location etc. of the employee
• Stage 5: These portals improve on the enterprise portals in stage 4 by including highly visual and graphical display formats that update in real time and allow for creation of dashboards
• Stage 6: This final stage of intranet portal sites includes application that actually allow for employees to get their work done from applications embedded in the portal page. This stage is called the Consolidated Workplace.
  

If you found this article interesting, you may be interested in
 the information at: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/

Happy Reading.  

 I watched the amazing Pan's Laybrinth recently. A movie about a portal. Well, one that was created to transport a princess to the underworld. So my liking the film probably had more to do with the fact that the film was brilliantly made, than with the portal connection. :)

I wandered over to the Pan's Laybrinth website (webby award winner !) and while there, found that there were pages from the directors notebook. Apparently, he is in the habit of  putting his thoughts into a journal, and then years later in the midst of a project he will remember something he sketched that would be perfect for what he was currently creating. Take a look at this snapshot of the journal. Talk about content rich. Maybe I am a Luddite, but I just don't see someone being able to do this using, say a blackberry.

Now if they had  a FlyTop  pen (or the more grownup version by Logitech) and the paper that goes with it - they would have best of both worlds. The flexibility of paper, and with a one gesture upload all the goodness of Digitality (tm). I stumbled into this product about a year ago, and am surprised that it has not yet taken the world by storm. (...all it needs is a wireless chip..)

Maybe sometime in the future, the notepad portlet, will also connect to my physical notebook. Maybe I will be able to throw some of my portal pages on to the wall or white board, and some to my real desktop (surface of four legged table). I could place my digital pen notebook on top of the notepad portlet area, to upload the pages I have written. Maybe I am more of a Futurist than a Luddite.