Fresh Start for an Intranet

It isn't every day that we have an opportunity to start with a clean slate and build something new — from the ground up — leveraging everything that we've learned from past mistakes (and successes). A few years ago we were lucky enough to have exactly this opportunity. These articles describe a few of the key principles we used:

• Store as much as possible in databases, to make it as easy as possible to manage and search the contents of the intranet.
• Loading pages directly from databases takes too long, no matter how fast or efficient the database. We devised a hybrid process so pages are database-driven and constantly refreshed — but still static HTML for maximum speed.
• Everyone's needs are different, so we continue to develop ways for people to customize their experience with the intranet.
• Create as many ways as possible to manage permissions while keeping security transparent to the user.
• In the spirit of data-driven decision-making, use data to organize the content and make navigation as user-friendly as possible.