Thankfully, to develop this new course, I’m working with a team of Sitecore Intranet Portal subject experts. Also, I have access to the most recent SIP build and work in progress documentation. This helps tremendously!
But what I think that helps the most is that at Sitecore we dogfood.
We dogfood www.sitecore.net with Sitecore CMS and Sitecore OMS.
We dogfood the partner portal with Sitecore CMS and Sitecore OMS.
For our corporate Intranet, then….guess what???
We dogfood with Sitecore Intranet Portal.
Go figure.
Luckily, as training program manager and course developer, it’s my job to update the all the related training program and courseware pages for our behind the firewall corporate intranet with magic sauce, top secret content. Here's a screenshot of our front-page. (The top-secret stuff I've blurred out).
Yet for all my jerky-boy sarcasm, there is an upside. For the past several months, I’ve been regularly creating and editing content with SIP. And with the Sitecore Page Editor user interface, it’s a breeze.
Most recently, I’ve been giving admin rights, allowing me to architect training program content at a power user / developer level. Of course, having admin access also means that I can screw everything up. And boy, how I can screw things up! You’d never imagine how sensitive those guys in product marketing are! One word that saves even the dumbest Kung Fu master: versioning.
Seriously though, my big take away from this experience is realizing how much an Intranet differs from other type of websites. Truth be told, with so many content editors, our humble little kick ass Intranet is a true ecosystem. Content grows, ebbs, flows and demands. There is Relevancy, Rigor and Relationship. My favorite three R’s for content.
As both participant and observer, I help fuel this constant crime of change. And realizing the organic nature of an Intranet, is, I argue, a core key concept for developers to “get”.
Like a farmer cultivating the fields, a developer must be aware of the Intranet ecosystem: the soil, the seasons, the weather, the sun, the fertilizer and the seed. For Sitecore developers, this translates to content tree architecture, data templates, branch templates, command templates, presentation components, special field types, site settings, skins, and web parts.
The first thing newbie SIP developers will discover is the extreme amount of detail and forethought put into Sitecore Intranet Portal. So much is already created for you. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t extend Sitecore Intranet Portal. Of course you can. But before doing so, you’ll probably want to know how the proverbial radio works. You’ll want to take it apart so that you can put it back together.
Later this week, let’s start taking things apart. Hopefully, in doing so, you'll become a little more inspired about your Intranet project and about how Sitecore Intranet Portal is the best solution for your company. And hopefully, I'll stumble upon divine inspiration for my course outline that is due. Speaking of which, if you have comments or suggests regarding topics, exercise or slides, please feel free to post them here.
-seth
Seriously though, my big take away from this experience is realizing how much an Intranet differs from other type of websites. Truth be told, with so many content editors, our humble little kick ass Intranet is a true ecosystem. Content grows, ebbs, flows and demands. There is Relevancy, Rigor and Relationship. My favorite three R’s for content.
As both participant and observer, I help fuel this constant crime of change. And realizing the organic nature of an Intranet, is, I argue, a core key concept for developers to “get”.
Like a farmer cultivating the fields, a developer must be aware of the Intranet ecosystem: the soil, the seasons, the weather, the sun, the fertilizer and the seed. For Sitecore developers, this translates to content tree architecture, data templates, branch templates, command templates, presentation components, special field types, site settings, skins, and web parts.
The first thing newbie SIP developers will discover is the extreme amount of detail and forethought put into Sitecore Intranet Portal. So much is already created for you. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t extend Sitecore Intranet Portal. Of course you can. But before doing so, you’ll probably want to know how the proverbial radio works. You’ll want to take it apart so that you can put it back together.
Later this week, let’s start taking things apart. Hopefully, in doing so, you'll become a little more inspired about your Intranet project and about how Sitecore Intranet Portal is the best solution for your company. And hopefully, I'll stumble upon divine inspiration for my course outline that is due. Speaking of which, if you have comments or suggests regarding topics, exercise or slides, please feel free to post them here.
-seth
Sitecore portal seems interesting...from the designers point of view, Intranet should be made simple enough to understood by the users and also should endorse all the benefecial modules like web 20, social media,etc.
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