If you happened to miss the report of top Intranet’s of 2009.  Six of the 10 winners used SharePoint in their deployments. I highly recommend reading the report.  Here’s some highlights from the report.  I was very impressed by the findings.  Great insights into ROI, scenarios, and usability.

Compliments: Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, January 5, 2009

useit.com Alertbox Jan. 2009 Intranet Design Annual  

Summary:
”Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint.”

Congratulations to the winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009:

• Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
• BASF SE, the world's leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
• COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
• Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global professional services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (a Global member organization)
• Environmental Resources Management (ERM), one of the world's leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
• HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
• Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
• L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
• McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

Kudos to Intranets for providing jobs:

“One of the strongest trends over the years that we've run this design competition is that intranet teams have been getting bigger. As the following chart shows, when we started honoring intranet projects in 2001, the average winning team had 6 members; today, the average team size is 14.”

This area was very insightful… list of Intranet “best practices.”  What do you do with your intranet???  (List quoted from Jakob Neilson’s Intranet design.)

• Company and industry news
• Integrating internal and external information sources
• Editorial control of the intranet homepage
• Keeping the intranet up-to-date
• CEO blogging
• Employee and department weblogs
• Onboarding of new employees
• Consistent navigation
• Multilingual intranets; supporting international employees
• Multimedia and video on intranets
• Data visualization
• Web 2.0 features on intranets
• Community
• Polls
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• Internal wikis
• Employee self service
• Search
• Governance
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Web analytics for intranets
• Staffing of intranet teams; where they report in the organization
• Updating and maintaining standards and guidelines for intranet design
• Intranet branding
• Promoting new intranet features
• Staff directory and employee profile pages
• Corporate calendars
• Personalization
• Customization
• Alerts
• Working with external design agencies
• Intranet budgets and staffing

Note the summaries are available, but the PDF is $224.  I’d consider buying this, especially if you are struggling with your Intranet designs.