I am debating writing a post about how SharePoint can be used as a tool to aid Internal Communications, but I wanted to do a bit of research first. Can you let me know how you get your messages / communications out to staff in your organization? Here are the options that come to mind (will update as you suggest them) :
- Announcement list
- Publishing / Wiki pages (for news items)
- Blog posts
- Discussions
- Surveys
- SharePoint Social  (e.g. activity feeds, tagging)
- Yammer
- SharePoint Alerts
- Community Sites
What about 3rd party tools? Do you utilise an SharePoint Add-ons to help with Internal Communications? Does anyone use any media such as video / podcasts etc?
UPDATE : I have written this up in How to use SharePoint for internal communications and also illustrated how DocRead can be used for Internal Communications.
We are currently using MySites (custom), SharePoint Alerts (Workflow), Custom Web parts, Discussions, Blog Post, and Tagging.. You name it we are probably using it..
Just added these to one of my famous List.ly lists called How to use SharePoint for internal communications.
I don’t know if this counts, but I still use a picture library to display the thumbnail flyer of an event. Also, there’s a call to action button (rspv, see menu, send email, etc) in one of my columns. This sits on my main page sorted by upcoming events.
Does that help at all? Not sure if that’s what you were really looking for.
We have just finished user acceptance testing of NewsGator/Sitrions Internal Communications product and will be rolling into production in the next few weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHXYfNB3Whg
What has worked best for us on collaborating on projects is using the OOB discussion board. We sync it with Outlook so those on a project get notifications quickly and can respond directly in Outlook without having to switch to their SharePoint project site and they can post new discussion items from within Outlook.
I would like to caution not to delete items in Outlook – remember, they are sync’d with the Discussion Board’s list and will be deleted there as well. You have to delete the folder (not the items) to ‘un’-sync the connection. 🙂
