The best source of detailed descriptions of high quality intranets is the series of Intranet Design Annuals from the Nielsen Norman Group which now go back a decade. In case it is of some value to readers I have listed in alphabetical order the organisations whose intranets have been included in the reports for 2007 - 2010 ...more

For many years now the annual Intranet Design Annual report from the Nielsen Norman Group has set a very high standard in selecting 10 high-quality intranets from the many that were submitted.  Remarkably no European organisations made it to the final selection. The authors of the report are Amy Schade, Patty Caya, and Jakob Nielsen. The 10 best-designed intranets for 2010 are Enbridge, Inc.(Canada), GE (USA), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA), Huron Consulting Group (USA), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), MITRE Corporation (USA), SCANA Corp. (USA), Trend Micro Inc. (Japan), URS Corp. (USA) and Wal-Mart Stores ...more

At Swiss Intranet Summit in Zurich in November there was a discussion about who invented the word intranet, and when. In a presentation I was giving I had suggested that 2009 marked 20 years of intranets, as 1989 was the year that Lotus Notes was launched. Intranet was certainly in common use in mid-1994 when Netscape was set up by Jim Clark (Sun Microsystems) and Marc Andriessen, who was on the team that had developed the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) ...more