September, 09 2016
From Rio to Tokyo - retail extranet success
Smart Media extranet is used in over fifty countries and on all continents apart from Antarctica. That may of course soon change, as our CEO has volunteered for a sales expedition to the utmost South!
Having a global extranet user base means that you need to treat your intranet like it was a website with a global audience - it must work with all browsers no matter on what operating system and it needs to be fast loading as there still are large pockets of users with limited connectivity – think oil rigs in Kazakhstan or a retail store in St Lucia. Depending on your business, you may also need to selectively show, suppress or alter photos for countries where a normal holiday beach shot may be considered indecent. And that is not only a case for fashion retailers operating in the Middle East – Singapore is also well known for its modesty.
Even if your intranet is accessed by employees only, you may find that enforcing global guidance may not be as straightforward as you first think. When I was working with the group Internet Manager at Shell, he had just discovered that in their Alaskan subsidiary the staff forum had a category for ‘guns for sale’. That was of course considered entirely normal by the local webmaster in Alaska where most staff were keen hunters and outdoor enthusiasts – even if you did not hunt you might need to defend yourself from the grizzly bears.
So if you see a draft intranet guidance document written by Smart Media, it may just mention that guns should not be traded on the staff forum. Or you may be advised how to use the image library access levels to filter images based on geographic regions.
Having a global extranet user base means that you need to treat your intranet like it was a website with a global audience - it must work with all browsers no matter on what operating system and it needs to be fast loading as there still are large pockets of users with limited connectivity – think oil rigs in Kazakhstan or a retail store in St Lucia. Depending on your business, you may also need to selectively show, suppress or alter photos for countries where a normal holiday beach shot may be considered indecent. And that is not only a case for fashion retailers operating in the Middle East – Singapore is also well known for its modesty.
Even if your intranet is accessed by employees only, you may find that enforcing global guidance may not be as straightforward as you first think. When I was working with the group Internet Manager at Shell, he had just discovered that in their Alaskan subsidiary the staff forum had a category for ‘guns for sale’. That was of course considered entirely normal by the local webmaster in Alaska where most staff were keen hunters and outdoor enthusiasts – even if you did not hunt you might need to defend yourself from the grizzly bears.
So if you see a draft intranet guidance document written by Smart Media, it may just mention that guns should not be traded on the staff forum. Or you may be advised how to use the image library access levels to filter images based on geographic regions.
Posted by Johanna Leppanen at 11:35
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