[Web4lib] internal marketing of an intranet/portal

[Norwood, Randy]

My institution (a law school with about 800 students and 120
faculty/staff) is implementing Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) as an
intranet/portal. So far, the applications that have been rolled out
include course web pages for a dozen or so professors plus a few
smaller, specialized web apps, document collections, etc. We are
planning to deploy several additional apps over the next several
months--mainly ports of existing home-grown apps that are commonly used
in law schools (e.g., picture board, seating charts).

We are looking for ways to do some internal marketing of our portal to
our users. Specifically, we would like to identify services, features
and applications, beyond those listed above, that they would find
beneficial. The problem is that, aside from a few early adopters, our
users have very little knowledge of what a portal is or what it can
potentially do, in terms of document management, workflow management,
collaboration, specialized
applications, etc. Even these concepts are hard to grasp if you have had
no experience with them and are not IT-literate.

I would like to get some suggestions from those who have successfully
implemented a portal, particularly in an academic environment. How did
you approach the problem, and what tools/methods did you use? In
particular, how did you address the problem of having to educate users
about portals at the same time as they were being asked to provide
suggestions on what they would like to see it do?

It's not our intent to deploy every tool or feature simply because it's
available. Many features are probably not suitable for our situation for
one reason or another. We need to find the right balance between
possibilities and the status quo.

thanks,

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Randy Norwood
Sr Programmer/Analyst
Texas Tech School of Law Library
Office: 806-742-3990 x350
Web/Intranet Requests:
http://intranet.law.ttu.edu/Lists/WebIntranet%20Requests/
Support: 806-742-3990 x318, computersupport.law at ttu.edu
E-mail: randy.norwood at ttu.edu