Her talk really brightened up my normally gloomy view of Sharepoint. And she shared her secret KM recipe, here it is (sshhh):

Here are some other points she made about leadership 2.0:

• Employee-centric
• Listen and value every staff’s input
• Ready to be surprised
• Tolerate mistakes
• Hear what you may not like to hear (and value it)
• Genuine dialogue with employees
• Willingness to let go the leader’s authority / power
• Leaders have to participate (not delegate!)

We had a chat while she was setting up before her talk. Bonnie and I had worked together before on an earlier Sharepoint project in Singapore, so we had some stuff to catch up on. The thing that makes me giggle gleefully is how she described Sharepoint’s blog and wiki tools – She called them ‘Fake Blogs’ and ‘Fake Wikis’, meaning that they don’t quite have the features and functions most of us have come to expect. And yes, that’s exactly how I’ve been feeling about them for a long time… In fact, ever since I tried to embed media into them. Thanks Bonnie, I’ll be calling them fake from now on too, thanks to you.

Jotspot was more than a wiki. It was a platform on which developers could build applications. For example, the Jotspot site we use has a blog, an app called a ‘bug reporter’, a discussion forum, a ‘knowledge base’ app and a project management tool. There were many other apps you could choose to add. I was hoping that Google Sites would continue to deliver this great functionality. Sadly, it does not.

At it’s most basic level, when you created a page in Jotspot you were given a choice of Web Page (basic wiki page), Spreadsheet, Calendar, Blog, File Cabinet and Photo Album.

Google gives you less. When you create a page in Google Sites you have a choice of Web Page (wiki page), Dashboard, Announcements, File Cabinet and Lists.

The Web Page is pretty much the same as the old Jotspot with a slightly improved wysiwyg editor. The dashboard is quite fun, I guess. You can use it to show your Google Calendar, Google Docs/Spreadsheets, Picasa slideshow, and other widgets.

But there are two important omissions:

1. You can no longer email content to a wiki page. Each Jotspot page had an email address allowing users to email updates to wiki pages or to email attachments to pages. We found that really useful. Especially for the less tech-savvy among our staff.

2. Spreadsheets are no longer integrated into the site. You need to link to them from Google Docs and drop them into the dashboard widget placeholder or onto a new page. And, I have to say, I couldn’t get this to work in Google Sites.

Here’s more opinion, from a loyal Jostpot user and from a reporter

One good thing is the consolidated email login through Google Apps Team edition. That is a great idea.

So why the title? Googlestein’s Monter? Because you have to cobble together all the functions you need. Like Frankenstein’s monster, there are lots of great bits, but they don’t fit together very well. There’s just no clear integration of the Google apps suite. You have to switch between your Startpage (another kind of dashboard), Google Calendar, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Google sites. You need to plug widgets into pages to get stuff like the calendar to work. And the blog, well, that’s not there at all.

I hate to say it, but Sharepoint just got a whole lot more attractive.

Only three topics attained top-level navigation status on the majority of the intranets:

• human resources (HR) information (66%)
• company information, (63%)
• news (59%)

Whilst he found that information about departments or divisions was a top-level category in 46% of intranets, he points out that:

“In our study, task-based structures often endured better than intranets organized departmentally. In our user testing of intranets, we’ve also found that task-based navigation tends to facilitate ease-of-learning. Thus, the benefits for IA durability are just one more argument in favor of adopting a task-based structure for your intranet.”

He expanded on this by adding that manufacturing companies often have a product category in their top-level navigation, and companies that focus on intellectual property tend to have a top-level knowledge management (KM) category (he doesn’t give an example of what this might be though).

And a warning for management not to meddle:

“One change that can be disastrous for intranet navigability is requests from top management to change navigation labels to reflect the latest buzzwords or corporate fashions. “

click for Intranet Information Architecture (IA) (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)