Robert,

Great info!  Really helpful in settling things.  Thanks a bunch.

Respectfully,

Adam Phillip Churvis

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C# & ASP.NET 2.0 for ColdFusion Developers at
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-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Munn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 12:54 PM
To: CF-Community
Subject: Re: Intranets and extranets

I thought you might ask about that. My statement is based on a bit of both
anecdotal experience and published information, though I might have
difficulty digging up the publication. On the anecdotal side, I built an
intranet for a large technology company. Our internal surveys and recorded
statistics from the site revealed that the employee directory accounted for
as much as 50% of the site usage, especially when we added features like a
tree that showed reporting relationships. I have also taken time to poll
other IT intranet owners, in an informal way, about their intranet usage
patterns. The directory always comes out on top, though I will stress that
my research is informal and by no means conclusive.

I believe the first hard data I saw about employee directory usage was from
the KMWorld Intranets conference back in 2001. I don't have any of the
publications from the conference, though, so I can't say for sure. Jaob
Nielsen makes a reference to the employee directory importance in his Best
Intranets of 2007 here:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html

" The *employee directory search* (the people finder) is a killer app on
most intranets. Microsoft uses the over-hyped Internet concepts of social
networking and *degrees of social distance* in a pragmatic manner to make
its employee search even better, sorting results by degree of distance from
the user. Often, it makes sense that users would want to find people closely
related to them; such sorting can be very helpful in a big organization
where many people may have similar names or the same job titles."

He has been at the KMWorld conference, and his group might actually have the
stats that you are asking about. He has another reference, more explicit
this time, in this article about Employee Directory Search, here:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030224.html

"We know from our research that looking up colleagues in the employee
directory is one of the key intranet killer apps in many companies. This
action is performed so frequently that a shortcut seems in order."


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