To help us organize information for publication on the intranet we've found it useful to identify key aspects of the information to be published, and organize the information into an orderly taxonomy. This taxonomy consists of four information categories -

• Sharing
• Alignment
• Projects
• Business

There are a number of content types and containers used to ensure that each item coming into the intranet environment is assigned to one of these categories. Here is a brief description of each category

Sharing is the crucible for new ideas, new views of the business, new approaches, and the development of new assets which help the business improve. In the manager's view, a company's sharing environment is an area where the best ideas are recognized within the organization, and propagated to other parts of the business. In many cases the manager sees the harvest of information coming from this classification as a competitive advantage in their market space. The knowledge stored within the minds of the employees is an untapped asset that could make the difference in the organization's success.

In the manager's view, organizational alignment is gained by delivering unfiltered information from the company leadership into the hands of employees. Management discussion areas like a "CEO Corner" or mottos like "Quality is Job 1" are examples of information that might be placed into this category. We've found that done well, instruments for alignment can serve as a catalyst for improvement.

They are established, staffed, run, and eventually disbanded. So why do we have a category for them? The issue addressed with this category came from the business managers' concern that they were unable to distinguish information used to run day-to-day operations from that used for specific projects.

In addition, managers expressed concern that organizations were unable to learn from projects regardless of outcome. A typical project team generates quite a bit of information as it begins to analyze the problem and the symptoms of the problem. Unless a specific mechanism is created to capture, store, and organize this information it will be lost, and as a result there is a chance that organization will learn nothing from the project.

The project category was designed specifically to retain information from these project efforts such that it can be reused by the organization or other project teams traveling along a similar analysis path.

Business

Information in this category provides the platform for basic health monitoring of business activities. In the case of a Finance organization this might mean monitoring cash flow, expense levels, or asset allocation. For Sales, there are the fundamental indicators around bookings, billings, and backlog. For the Manufacturing team, the key indicators might revolve around quality, cycle time, costs, or capacity.

Essentially, information in the business classification serves as monitoring gear for day-to-day operations. It allows managers to keep their employees focused on key elements of the business by bringing these indicators to the forefront of everyone's consciousness through their intranet portal.

In our experience, information in this category is not only brought into the environment by individuals, but is imported from the transactional systems like MRP, CRM, Quality Management, and so on which are the foundation for daily business activities.

Armed with a scheme for classifying the raging torrent of information generated by employees and the transactional systems they interact with, and Zope's inherent ability to catalog items by applying metadata, we now have the ability to search fairly efficiently through the catalog to find pieces of information relevant to a specific set of tasks, for a specific set of employees, at a specific point in time. In short we can fulfill the promise "put the right information into the right hands at the right time."

To do this we use another powerful tool in the Zope environmental arsenal, search. When we first examined Zope for use as an Intranet environment we were struck by the fact that all of the data rendered by Zope was the result of some type of search. Whether it was something as generic as a search through the portal catalog, or more specific like obtaining a list of objects inside of a folder, they all perform a search returning a list of content items (objects).

Not only does this make the process of finding information on the intranet more efficient through the use of search tools, it also allows us to "combine" many small searches into a "composite" view of disparate information types (Business, Projects, Alignment, Sharing). This ability to define a set of searches, render the results of each search individually, and then "composite" them into a single view is what pulls it all together.

If you think of a newspaper, it is divided into sections for Sports, Business, Food, Local and so on. Add to this a Front Page with headlines and important stories that the editors feel are the first thing that people would be interested in.

In a similar fashion an Intranet can be the "newspaper" for the company, with the main or home page functioning as front page, and the organizational portals acting as business, sports, local, and other sections. As with the newspaper, each of these representations has a composite view of that sectionÕs important information. Headlines attract the attention of visitors to those important pieces of information, and lead-ins encourage users to follow the path down to the item itself.

Based on the goals and objectives set forth by the business manager, we craft the portal composite to reflect his or her view on what information is important for their employees. One manager might choose to emphasize group announcements, another might choose to highlight business metrics, while still another manager might feel that the monitoring of projects is the most important thing for their organization.

Zope makes all of this possible through its native catalog and search capabilities. In addition, CMF brings in a structure for managing content types, security, and other key elements for the management of intranets.

Finally, CMF adds the concept of "skinning" to the picture, allowing site managers to deliver different views of the same cataloged items merely by changing templates. This provides the business an ability to composite information into many different decision contexts, and frees the intranet management team to provide a level of customization and personalization without changing any of the basic building blocks provided by Zope environment.

For the most part this article has stayed within the boundaries traditionally set for Intranets where employees add content to the environment with the intent of publishing the content for other employees to use.

As we've alluded in the description of the business classification, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Because of Zope's ability to speak SQL, the whole world of information contained in relational databases is available for presentation as well. This means that elements of business reporting can be brought into the intranet environment and presented alongside items that lend context to the information.

You can imagine building a "dashboard" of business metrics, and having a summary view of the "top five" metrics presented with announcements from the management team on efforts to improve them.

Temporary cross-functional teams can be formed with temporary sites built to support them without having to change any of the basic intranet support structure. Like projects, these temporary sites can remain as a reference to other teams pursuing similar issues in the future because the information generated is categorized and cataloged by default.

These and many other things are possible because Zope and CMF provide the platform from which an IT organization can collect, assemble, and disseminate information to every employee with a browser and intranet connection.

In this article we've given you a cursory look at how Zope and CMF can fulfill the promise of the intranet for our class of business user. We've walked through some of the features, and how we use them to create information composites to help focus the business and gain efficiency. It is probably impossible to completely cover the topic in the context of one article. Simply put, the possibilities of applying Zope and CMF to the intranet space are nearly infinite.

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