OneWindow Features: News and Events

In the traditional, top-down communications paradigm of corporate intranets, there are two different but related concerns. First, content publishers need to be able to issue company-wide news and announcements to all users, and they want to have those users actually read and engage with the material. Second, publishers also want to send out articles and messages that are targeted to particular audiences within the company.

Content may only be of interest to employees in a certain department, with a particular job title, working on a specific project or having certain specialized knowledge.

Users also need smaller, distinct groups and spaces where they can congregate and share information relevant to their interests. Many intranet platforms have been moving away from this top-down communications concept and toward a more peer-to-peer approach to content management.

Adopting a more decentralized attitude toward your intranet material — in which employees not only consume content but are allowed to produce it themselves — encourages users to adopt your company intranet and motivates them to produce interesting, insightful content. However, the choice between top-down and peer-to-peer content management isn’t a binary one. Striking the right balance for your users can be tricky and may require some experimentation.

The OneWindow Workplace Solution

To address the needs of traditional, top-down intranet publishers, OneWindow contains a global news module in which a limited set of users can create announcements, publicize upcoming events and post articles and stories. Once published, the content appears on OneWindow’s News and Events page, which provides users with a single, unified view of the information most relevant to them. The page includes both internal content and external sources such as blog posts, Twitter feeds and news from around the industry. Users can easily sort and locate content by using the drop-down refiners.

The OneWindow team has also developed a personalization engine that matches up the tags on published content with the unique interests of each employee registered in the system. During registration, users are automatically enrolled in subscriptions to a series of subjects, or they can choose from a selection of topics in order to further fine-tune their interests. From that point, the intranet content about certain topics is matched up with the people who have expressed interests in those topics, which allows you to send out that content only to the relevant users.

It’s also important to note that many articles, events and updates are often spread offline not via top-down and company-wide means, but throughout smaller groups and workspaces. Within these specialized spaces, OneWindow supports a similar set of features as those available to the users of the global news module. Users are able to publish announcements, post articles and publicize events that relate to the happenings of a particular interest group or project. The information is distributed to the members of the group or workspace, with an option to push certain updates like milestone accomplishments out to broader audiences. These larger updates can then circulate around the more globally accessible corporate channel.

Looking Forward

There’s always room for improvement, and the team continues working on the relevance of OneWindow’s recommendations. That includes the matches OneWindow makes between users and their specific interests and overall user experience.