Maintenance Considerations

• Basic types of intranets
• Comparison with internet sites
• Symptoms of poor maintenance

There are a number of issues that need to be taken into account when organizing a maintenance plan for your intranet. In the worst case scenario (multiple servers in information chaos), document searches can be a nightmare, dragging up all kinds of pages and useless information – from individual PowerPoint slides to documents that are off limits. In addition, much information may be duplicated on several sites, organized differently causing searches to produce confusing link connections that take time to be sorted out. This multiplies the lost employee productivity described by Nielsen.

Another example of inattention to your intranet site is a phenomenon called "linkrot." When performing regular maintenance, it is easy to pay close attention to your internal links and outgoing links to other sites (on a large corporate intranet) . However, this does not take into account the possibility that other sites are not doing the same regarding their links to you. It is good practice to provide a re-direct page at the old address if a URL has moved, because you can't get feedback from visitors who can't find you (Abeleto Ltd., 1999-2001).

Other symptoms of poor maintenance practices include the ubiquitous 404 codes that represent broken links to previously active pages. With a large, disjointed corporate intranet and a "wild west" environment to struggle with, even if local site links are maintained, you don’t know anything about other employees still maintaining links to obsolete pages on your site [See Fig. 1a and Fig. 1b]. These images happen to be from an internet site. However, they are excellent examples of poor maintenance, even by experts in usability.

Fig. 1a

Fig. 1b

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