Mistake #8: Designing the intranet in an IT ivory tower.

It's been said before but it's worth repeating: Involve and engage your users throughout this project.

There's no way you can begin to understand the practical concerns of everyday life for every single department in the company, nor are you expected to. The intranet should serve the entire community, so involve them from the very beginning.

An intranet team comprised of power users from every department will yield a robust system that works for all departments, not just a few.

Or, put another way, ask yourself, "If the HR department designed the intranet for the entire company, will it match how IT works and thinks?"

Mistake #9: Minimizing the importance of robust search.

How many times have you failed to find an important document; one you were absolutely certain you saved in a folder on the file server? If you can't easily find content that you personally filed, how will others find files on the corporate intranet?

Pick a product that provides users with several options for search, including traditional search (by specific words or phrases) via an online catalog organized by company-defined categories; or by filtering through content they've personally tagged or to which they've given custom labels.

By demanding a product with multi-faceted search, you can pull together all content and people connected to one other in some fashion: keywords, tags, categories, author, department and more, to make your intranet even more valuable.

Now you have it: the secrets to launching an intranet that your community will love. There's a lot of power to be harnessed from a corporate intranet: streamlined workflows, community-building and collaboration tools. It's up to CIOs to show their companies how.

Martin Amm is the CEO and one of the founders of adenin TECHNOLOGIES, providers of IntelliEnterprise, a fully-integrated intranet suite for mid-sized to large organizations. The suite includes collaboration, knowledge management, content management and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, delivering a virtual workspace where people inside and outside the organization can work together more effectively. Mr. Amm has more than 26 years of hands-on experience in the software industry, both in management and software development. Before founding Adenin, he was the CEO of Amasis Software Corporation, an ERP vendor, and of Two to One Consulting Ltd. Mr. Amm speaks at industry conferences and has authored articles on the topic of intranet best practices for IntranetsToday and TechRepublic. He can be reached at martin.amm@adenin.com.