Intranet Overview

A school's intranet, element two, is the more readily apparent of the three zones with transformation potential. That is, the intranet should dovetail with the academic program, providing leverage and productivity enhancing alternatives for collaboration among students and faculty.

Examples of an intranet as a repository of valued capability include the following. Such capabilities insure greater site usage and satisfaction.

• Sharing among students and faculty of assignments and homework.
• Internal departmental meeting schedules and calendars.
• Contact information for school employees and students.
• Personalized pages (a la MSN, Excite, Yahoo), which after login show homework assignments, teacher comments, and personal calendars.

In "look-and-feel" the intranet must be in harmony with the school's color palettes and style guide, while providing flexibility for users to customize their pages within the school's prescribed rules.

Where an intranet already exists, the best procedures to follow include:

• Examine site architecture for clear organization and navigation.
• Coordinate "look-and-feel" with the Internet site.
• Update and purge stale content as appropriate. Recycling valued content and functionality will optimize the benefits of the new look and feel with the familiar, enhancing school community buy-in.
• Review how the intranet is currently used.
• Review current content management tools and procedures, retaining what works and providing alternatives for what doesn't. Intuitive user-friendly tools and forms should be integrated as required.
• Establish an acceptable and flexible set of procedures and policies to be followed for intranet usage and maintenance of content.
• Have the external development team available on site to assist the school's internal team to obtain buy-in for the site. This can include:
  • Instruction seminars - Q & A at the class, club, school, parent level - with all the school's community users.
  • Obtaining systematic feedback on what is working, what is not, and why?
  • Thought partnering with the school's internal team on feedback received in 7b and elsewhere, and establish a set of needs requirements and specifications, plus a project plan with realistic timelines and budget. This will optimize the probability of achieving the transformation goals and objectives, and attain maximum return on investment.
• The school can, at its option, put out a detailed RFP for bid after a thorough review of its needs.

Multiple Access Rights and Levels

Access to the intranet via login is available from any page on the public facing section of a school's Internet site. As there are multiple users with multiple objectives (e.g. faculty with assignments, administrators with calendars, students with clubs) multiple access levels and rights must be established.

Policies must be in place for reviewing and approving content prior to it appearing on the site. With greater utilization the intranet will have a greater role and importance, hence a greater need for protection from attack, viruses, and electronic vandalism.

The team assigned the responsibility must review school policies and procedures in place for:

• Granting authorizations and access
• Uploading and removing content
• QA testing content in a staging environment prior to promotion to a public facing site
• Hosting - review internal and external options

To recap, the intranet is one of the most critical areas that will enable the school's aspirations and objectives for the website, and thus requires greatest of focus.