Our intranet is based on a distributed publishing model. In such a model the ‘central team’ is often not responsible for any pages, but merely facilitates other parts of the organization to publish. Its not an ideal model for external sites and can fail miserably internally unless close control/engagement is kept with the publishing community. Last year this publishing community was over 300 people!

One of the constant challenges the intranet team (can a duo be called a team?) face is determining how many publishers throughout the firm we can professionally manage? 20? 50? 500?

It is simply impossible for an editor to professionally manage 300 publishers. Managing 50 publishers and achieving basic quality standards is very demanding. We have a number of quality and compliance standards with various degrees of enforcment.

With no budget for travel or training the challenge for us is to leverage relationships and find ways to engage on a regular basis with our publishing community.

We do this through a number of techniques:

getting sponsors for all our work

conducting training via webinar

intranet newsletter

intranet blog

News updates on our site section pages

Insite/Knowledge meetings sponsored by streams.

We’ve manage to achieve much with little. How sustainable this approach is as the demands on Insite grows is a question in our minds for 2010.