Best practices for intranet development

by Steve Blass

May 7, 2001 —

We are putting together a report on best practices in intranet development. What resources on the Web would give me an indication of what constitutes best practices in this area?

Searching on the phrase "world's best intranet development practices" and other variations on the theme through your favorite search engine will provide a wealth of references to "best practices" and "intranet development" case studies that all boil down to "planning your work" and then "working your plan." Many publications and vendors have published best practices information and not all of it is proprietary marketing material. My recommendation is to look to the professional organizations in the field(s) of interest. If you need world's best program management guidelines, go to www.pmi.org. For a best practice perspective on business systems development, look at www.dsdm.org.

For software development best practices, go to www.sei.org. System administration guidelines can be found at the system administrator's guild, www.usenix.org/sage/. Security best practices information can be found on www.sans.org. Best practices in intranet development vary as the organizational problems to be solved change, but rapid prototyping, feature churn and flexibility, along with attention and response to user experience feedback seem to constantly make the best practices list.

Network World