I’m on the move and still able to use BT’s intranet

June 24, 2009 at 10:59 am | Posted in application, benchmark, benefit, best practice, homepage, intranet, standards | 11 Comments
Tags: benchmark, best practice, bt intranet, intranet applications, standards, users, value

Here’s another example the Intranet Benchmarking Forum identifed as best practice when benchmarking BT’s intranet. You can find the first and second examples of best practice here.

IBF say “BT’s intranet is designed to support mobile workers so it is fully accessible from mobile devices. Mobile users use a text-based interface.”

People in BT can use a variety of mobile devices – Blackberrys, iPhones, mobiles with media capability – on our intranet to:

Access all content needed for their work
Some applications like Directory can be used with more applications being enabled
Listen to podcasts
Collaborate on our corporate wiki
Post on your blog.

This helps improve productivity while people are travelling or just in a different workplace for a while. It cuts down on that ‘dead time’ while on a train for example. It also encourages a culture of working remotely from your main place of work when needed.

Here are some examples of best practice showing what the content and applications look like with full and PDA – text only - versions for you to compare.

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Hi Mark,

Was the intranet designed to be read like this (text based) on mobile devices, or is it simply a preference/cookie if you’re using one?

Comment by Alex Manchester— June 25, 2009 #

Reply
- Hi Alex,
  
  It wasn’t either of these.
  
  We designed the CMS templates to avoid being “PDA hostile”. In some cases we provided a second template to do a “clean” version of the page. This didn’t require any extra effort for the publishers. It is built into the template.
  
  We don’t ‘browser sniff’ or set cookies and we don’t ask people to write extra pages for PDAs (though we do force accessibility rules and that has the lovely by-product of ensuring the content is PDA friendly).
  
  Mark
  
  Comment by markmorrell— June 25, 2009 #
  
  Reply
Ok thanks, Mark, useful to know.

Comment by Alex Manchester— June 29, 2009 #

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