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I read a recent article about the question of dashboard views being more effective than intranet pages. The common perception of an "intranet" is static pages which everyone in the company sees when they log into the company portal. Dashboards on the other hand, provide a high level view of the contents of the company portal - tasks, documents, emails, pictures, calendar and so on. There is also the emerging concept of "social dashboards" where the dashboard view may be customized to each user, such that a user gets a high level view of whatever is important to them. In my view, dashboards and intranets are not either/or at all. An ideal intranet or company portal is a combination of the best of dashboards and static intranets. Having solely a dashboard view has the downside of merely being a collection of tools, without any context around them. However, in this era of virtual teams, where team members may never meet face to face, a portal is not merely a repository of tools, but also a place for corporate communication to these team members, as well as a hub to foster a spirit of camaraderie and a vehicle of motivation. Intranet pages perform this function well, as they communicate company news, provide context around portal tools, publish important team information or recognize someones efforts. At the same time static intranet pages can be limiting, because employees also look at a portal for the primary place to organize work, and find tools for collaboration. At the same time, having the same static pages for all employees is obviously not good, as needs of different employees are different. Therefore, an ideal mix is a mix of static intranet and dashboard design. The landing page should be customizable to every employee, should provide a high level view of calendar events, tasks, important documents, but at the same time should allow static content around these tools to add context, and add additional content such as news feeds, company message, employee of the month badges and so on. And it is not an impossible objective to achieve. Intranet software like HyperOffice let you do just this.Â
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