The end of the European intranet spring conference season I had the pleasure of being in a very warm Gothenburg for the Intrateam Intranatverk 2014 event, organised by Kristian Norling and Kurt Kragh Sørenson. Day 1 (May 20) was in Swedish and Day 2 was in English. The format was interesting, with mainly very focused 20 minute papers followed by a 5-10 minute discussion period. This worked well as speakers were very willing to spend time after their presentation to talk with delegates in more detail about the projects they were involved with. Intrateam has published a summary of Day 1 in Swedish.
The opening paper on Day 2 was given by Annika Appeltoft (Ericsson) who described the very comprehensive governance structure for its main global . Kirsi Valimar (Preem) then described the very much smaller intranet at this Swedish petroleum refiner. The conference took place at the same time as the Step Two Intranet 2014 conference in Sydney, and this was an opportunity to hear Octavia Maddox (AMP) describe the way in which the AMP intranet team went about relaunching their intranet ( a winner in the 2014 Intranet Innovation Awards and the 2014 Intranet Design Awards! ) in a live video link from Australia. Sadly the video link was a bit fragile but it was still possible to gain an impression of the enormous amount of user-requirements work the team had undertaken. This paper was followed by Tony Byrne (Real Story Group) and Pertuu Tovalen (North Patrol) assessing the options for intranet CMS and portal software, with Tony focusing on SharePoint.
After lunch there were some very short vendor presentations from Intrexx, Iris, LIfeRay and Yammer. Cristina Filipe Araujo then talked about cultural issues in the deployment of the intranet at Bayer Crop Science followed by a very entertaining paper from Mads Richard Møller (Intracom) on a range of intranet adoption and management issues. Wedge Black moved the audience back towards tactics with a very thoughtful paper on writing good content for intranets. Arthur Turksmaa spoke about the intranet intranet at his company Triptic, a winner in the Intranet Design Awards 2014 and the developers of the Iris intranet software product. I then finished off the day with a look back at intranet good practice in 1998 (little changed today!) and some thoughts on digital workplaces.
On Day 3 there were workshops on Digital Workplace technology options from Tony Byrne, writing for the web by Wedge Black and a search clinic given by me.
Overall it was a very enjoyable conference with a wide range of excellent papers and a very conversational environment, especially for Swedish delegates who were able to take advantage of the Day 1 papers and discussions. Intrateam has only recently set up a Swedish operation and on the basis of this year’s event I am sure that in due course Intranatverk will match the February Intrateam Event in Copenhagen in terms of both the number of presentations and of delegates.
Martin White