IntraNews: A News Recommending Service for Corporate Intranets

It is often problematic for employees in large companies to keep up to date with what is going on within the organisation. Lately, corporate intranets has been introduced as a channel for organisational communication. An intranet enables easy access to, e.g., ongoing project information, technical documentation, organisational newsletters and policies. However, even with an intranet it is still a non-trivial task to find out what is going on. The tools that are applied to retrieve information, e.g., search engines (Altavista) and portals (Yahoo) are not easy to use on intranets. For example, a heavy workload prevents people from browsing collections of link and search engines are primarily aimed at supporting users with clear goals. To find out what is going on in a large organisation needs to be treated with another strategy. In this paper existing techniques are first introduced and compared from the viewpoint of their applicability to provide people, in a large company, with information about what is going on. A new application for such circumstances, named “IntraNews,” is then introduced. IntraNews was designed based on implications from empirical work at a large European company group. The system is a recommender service specialised for intranets with a lot of users.