Interact Intranet: Announcements using Keywords

Interact Intranet provides several options for displaying news/announcements within your site. Below are two that we are considering:

Document List

A Document List widget allows you to select content from specific content areas with a lot of flexibility.  As an admin you can select whether or not to display a thumbnail, the number of items to show, how to order them (alpha, or chrono), whether to display the date, summary, etc.  To utilize this type of widget you'd need to set aside a category (content area) specifically for your news items and point the widget there.  Each time someone in your organization needs to post an announcement they would create the item in that folder and it would automatically display.

Keywords

Another option for displaying announcements is to use the Keyword Search widget.  This widget is different from the Document List above in that rather than looking at a particular category in your system it instead looks at every document in your system and displays only those that match your keyword criteria.  If someone in your organization needs to post an announcement they can post it wherever the content fits into the taxonomy, and simply by adding a keyword such as home_announcement it will display within this widget.  To take this a step further, you could have multiple Keyword Search widgets on homepages of different areas of your site, for example on the Human Resources home page and make the same announcement appear simultaneously in both by using a second keyword such as HR_announcement.

Differences

• Archives
• All announcements created using the Document List are stored in a particular category, therefore it simplifies showing a full index of items - just link to the category.  For a Keyword Search you could create a link that points to the particular keyword and view the contents as search results.
• Breadcrumb & Side Navigation
• The side navigation and breadcrumb of an announcement remain consistent if all documents live in the same category and use the Document List.  When using the Keyword Search each announcement would take you to the corresponding area where the document lives.  To get back to the main announcements they'd need to click on the Home tab again (or the back button) where the Document List option would show a more intuitive Announcement category in the side navigation.  Both approaches require a single click to get back to the list of announcements.
• Duplication of content
• Documents can live within multiple categories, however they can only live within a single area.  Therefore if you have an important announcement that relates to content in a particular area of your site you'd need to create it there and additionally create it in your designated announcement category if using the Document List approach.  This is a moot issue when using the Keyword Search because it can pull content from any category so the content would only need to exist once.

Features	Document List widget	Keyword Search widget
Show thumbnail	Yes	Yes
Show mini-thumbnail	Yes	No
Show author	No	Yes
Show date	Yes	Yes
Show summary	Yes	Yes
Show in 2 columns	No	Yes
Control # to display	Yes	Yes