Revisiting the 2008 Intranet Design Awards

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html

A couple of things stand out about Dr. Jakob Nielsen's 2008 Intranet Design Awards that are worth revisiting, as 2008 draws to a close.

Here is his summary:
"Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good intranets. This year's winners focused on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to "knowledge management"), and better-presented company news."

The Award Winners for the top 10 best-designed 2008 intranets are:

"1. Bank of America, US
2. Bankinter S.A., Spain
3. Barnes & Noble, US
4. British Airways, UK
5. Campbell Soup Company, US
6. Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation, US
7. IKEA North America Service, LLC, US
8. Ministry of Transport, New Zealand
9. New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia
10. SAP AG, Germany"

First, the technologies Dr. Nielson mentions are best in class:

"The most-used products were SharePoint and the Google Search Appliance.[emphasis mine- Ed.] Other frequently used products were Red Hat Linux, Lotus Notes and Domino, and Oracle databases.

No single product made the list of most-used products for all of the four most recent Design Annuals (2005-2008). This simple fact reinforces the point that intranet platforms still have a long way to go. That said, the following products made the most-used lists more than once during this four-year period:

3 of 4 years: Google Search Appliance, Microsoft SQL Server
2 of 4 years: Apache, Documentum, IBM WebSphere, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Lotus Notes and Domino, Oracle databases, SharePoint"



The second item that Dr. Nielsen points out is the use of Microsoft's Silverlight for interactivity:

"In addition to these widely used intranet technologies, we constantly see new ones applied. For example, the Ministry of Transport is already using Microsoft's Silverlight technology to add interactivity to one of its intranet areas."

For 2009 expect to see more Sharepoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Google Appliance, and Microsoft Silverlight in use on intranets, in addition to the other things Dr. Nielsen mentioned.