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Note:
This article contains best practices for managing your sites and content. For instructions on how to create sites, click here.
Proper governance requires resources and ongoing commitment from an organization.
- Understand the requirements and standards of a site: Simpplr advises Site managers maintain certain standards for the quality of their content, as well as stick to requirements for all sites across the intranet.
- Create and secure a steering committee: The best governance team requires a cross-functional approach.
- Distribute federated ownership: Identifying individuals who will help set up, and update the intranet across the organization.
- Create clear guidelines: Intranets should have easy to follow guidelines and criteria which enables employee engagement, and doesn’t restrict it.
- Maintain your site: Decide your long-term strategy now for keeping content fresh and relevant.
- Provide support and training: A process is needed that supports the onboarding, equipping, and regular assistance for managers and publishers.
Understand the requirements and standards of a site
All sites on Simpplr have a certain set of requirements and standards to meet. Before creating your site, consider:
- Site planning: What content, files, links, etc. will be included on the site?
- Site purpose: What is the purpose of this site? Does it add value to team members?
- Managing and maintenance of the site: Who will carry the responsibility of Site manager(s) and maintain the site over time?
- Marketing and promotion of the site: How do you plan on getting word out that the site exists?
- Breadth of information and audience: How much unique information will be available on the site that does not currently exist elsewhere on the intranet? And who is the intended audience?
Once you have a clear vision for your site, keep in mind that all sites across Simpplr must meet the following requirements. A site must:
- Adhere to the use of internal-only content
- Contain information that is not highly confidential
- Have multiple content items (i.e. pages, events, albums)
- Have multiple pages, events and albums associated with it
- Have an owner and at least one manager
- Be updated regularly (quarterly minimum)
- Be work appropriate
- Have a banner image and thumbnail
- Have carousel content (3-6 items)
Create and secure a steering committee
Cross-functional business units and locations need to commit to ongoing representation to ensure the intranet and communication strategies ongoing success. The group should meet regularly, have executive sponsorship and leadership oversight. This committee typically meets monthly or quarterly to review what’s working, assess which sites/knowledge are underserved and continually align with high level company-wide goals.
Distribute federated ownership
Simpplr was created to make configurations and content creation easy so updates can happen at the speed of business. This means intranet ownership can be decentralized and responsibility shared among content owners and publishers. When a distributed content administration model is adopted, the quality and volume of the content increase across the platform.
Create clear guidelines for Site managers
Site managers should have clear guidelines for creating and maintaining sites. Before creating any site, it's helpful to prepare a template that outlines your vision.
All Site owners/managers should consider the following questions when planning sites:
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Who is my audience?
- Define the target audience, i.e. who will consume the information on your site. Subscriptions can help you gain initial site follows.
- Define your site's access. Will the site be private, allowing limited access to only site members, or public, which allows open visibility on the intranet?
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Is there a site or page already for this audience?
- Consider how you plan to set your site apart from existing material. Are you providing new information that your audience finds valuable?
- Should your content go on the existing site/page?
- How often will this information be updated?
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How is your audience going to access the content?
- If you expect your audience to access the site through the mobile app for example, focus on constructing thoughtful content in pages that can be easily consumed on a mobile device.
- If you expect most users to get your information through Search, use topics and informative titles to allow more visibility into your content.
- Who is going to maintain the site?
- How will your business leaders participate?
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What do you want on your site dashboard and why?
- Determine whether or not having dynamic content on your dashboard helps support your site's purpose.
- Should your dashboard contain links, files or social campaigns?
- Remember to think about how you want your audience to find and consume your information quickly and efficiently.
- Do you want to use the feed to have forum style postings on the site, or should you restrict feed posts?
Maintain your site
Creating a Site manager agreement is about keeping the site relevant and up to date. Adhering to the above guidelines, being responsive to feedback, participating in the monthly/quarterly governance meeting are intrinsic to a long-term strategy.
Provide support and training
Provide tier-1 support on how to use the system and train Site managers/content contributors and creators. These people will all need adequate support and training to ensure technology doesn’t add friction to the governance process.
- Onboarding Site managers with training and office hours in the beginning will ensure good adoption.
- In addition to text, use as many screenshots and as much video as possible!
Comments
Hello!
I searched your KB and didn't see anything about changing page owners. Is that something that only site admins can do? Or can a site manager do this for pages in sites they manage?
Thanks,
Michelle Barnes
Hey Michelle. Typically changing content authors/owners isn't a recommended best practice outside of our Ghostwriting/Protected authors feature. I've linked that article here. However, there are ways a System admin can change a content author via the Salesforce Developer app. More information on that process can be found here.
Thanks, Matthew. In this case, several pages were published by an apprentice or an employee who no longer works at our company. We want the current/correct page owner to be displayed at the top of the page.
Isn't it as easy as editing the page and selecting "Change" to change the page author?
This is from one of my content managers: "A couple of weeks ago I changed all of the "by Alexandra Carabelea Mihai" pages to Logan, but they are showing Alex as the author/owner again. Since Alex is gone, can you please let us know how to permanently move these to Logan?"
Did this happen because she is a content manager, not a site manager? Or, was it some other kind of glitch? Or, are admins the only ones who can change page owners?
Anyone with edit access to the content (content manager, site owner, etc.) should be able to go in and change the author. But that new author needs to be added to the protected authors list before hand. An App manager can do this by following the instructions in the article I linked above on protected authors.
Hi!
What is the best way for a user to "bookmark" a site so that it's quick for them to access? Is there a best practice for this in Simpplr?
Thanks,
Michelle
Hi Michelle. There are a few ways to quickly access sites, but I would suggest utilizing Following sites to have them easily accessible. All users can head to the Sites tab, then click Following to see a full list of sites they follow. This is essentially the same as bookmarking.
Another way would be to literally bookmark the URL of the site dashboard to your browser, like I did here on Chrome.
Hi Matthew,
Just reading through Michelle's comments on page owners. My understanding was that Protected authors were used for people like your CEO. However, in Michelle's case (and in mine) I just want to change the author as someone has gone on maternity leave. They aren't a protected author, just a standard author.
Are you saying that every time we change an author by going in the page, we need to add them to the protected author list? Or have I misinterpreted the question?
Hi Natasha. So for changing content authors, as long as you have Content management permissions, you're able to change the author to anyone else in the company. The protected author list is typically reserved for C-level folks who you're publishing on behalf of. But technically anyone can be added to it. If you just want to change the content author, you just need Content management permissions, and you can edit any content you manage to change the author.
Thanks Matthew, you mentioned:
"Anyone with edit access to the content (content manager, site owner, etc.) should be able to go in and change the author. But that new author needs to be added to the protected authors list before hand"
So I'm trying to understand why the "new author needs to be added to the protected authors list before hand". Because we don't do that when do a basic author change. We have simply gone to the page, clicked edit and changed the author (as per your response).
I was trying to see if I had overlooked something :-)
Hi Natasha. Please disregard that sentence. I was under the impression that we were speaking about the Ghostwriting feature before.
Matthew Rawls, We created a site named "Company Strategy" but later renamed it "Purpose, Mission & Strategy." A colleague recently shared a new story she had written into our Teams chat and the "rich content unfurl display" (or whatever the right name is) showed me the story nicely, but it said the site name was "Company Strategy."
I assume it's referencing a field other than the site name that was created when the site was created. Is there a way to change that reference field to match the new site name? Can this be done in Salesforce, perhaps?
Hi Linda. It's hard to tell what could be happening here without going into the environment, but that shouldn't be happening. It could be bug. Can you send screenshots and submit a case to our Support team to look into it further?
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