Just thought I would paste in the email content of the changes
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TABS

We've changed them from:
My Account | People | Groups | Administration
to:
Home | Bookmarks | Programs | Schools | College

Our aim here was to make it easier to find the major group sites on the
intranet by pulling the 3 main categories of groups into their own tabs. A
secondary aim was to hilight your ability to bookmark places on the intranet
by giving those their own tabs.

Menu changes are designed to support those ends. By changing Administration
to College, we could then logically group a variety of college-level sites
in that tab's menu. Consequently, offices such as EBO and ECN are grouped
below the cabinet-level administration units, and Committees are placed at
the top of the college menu for easy access.

Since there are no longer separate People and Groups menus where separate
bookmarks for those types of site could live, we're making it possible to
bookmark any particular page on the Intranet, not just personal or group
home pages. (The script to create a bookmark still creates link objects
within your personal site, but I'll soom be changing it to add the bookmarks
to your menu.)

To give you a way to browse to personal page or group sites, the Home menu
has links to both those areas: "Browse Personal Sites..." and "Browse Group
Sites..."

At the moment, when you first arrive at the Intranet you still land on what
was the Administration home page (now the College home page).

Our intention is to have it drop you instead on the Home tab, which will be
designed as a broader, more general-purpose "portal" to the Intranet. The
College main page will then become more of a more narrowly focused
navigation page providing access to college sites and information.

We're not sure exactly what that will look like yet, and we'd like to hear
your ideas on how that might be designed.

Our initial thoughts are that in addition to some sort of announcements and
events listings, there might be a set of links to various tools or
functions, help, etc. We might want to feature a simple grid of links to the
main areas (Committees, Programs, Schools, College, etc.) even though
they're available through the tabs, just to make sure people don't miss
them.

So... what do you think an Intranet landing page should feature?


LOGIN

We've placed a small "Log In" link up next to the search box in the upper
right corner. The location was chosen because that is one convention that if
fairly common on the web.

When you click it, a login form appears just above it, pushing the page
down. After you log in, the form goes away again, and your fully-qualified
name and a "Log out" take the place of the log in link.

Eventually, Brian and I would like to eliminate the My Account block in the
left sidebar. That would let us offer you the option of hiding the left
sidebar completely for situations where you want to use the whole width of
the browser window for your content.

Does anyone think that would cause significant problems for your users?


TAGS and SAVED SEARCHES

We've adopted the current internet feature called "tags" to give you a way
to flexibly collect categories of things, without forcing you to group them
all in a single folder.

Tags are one-word labels or categories, separated by spaces, that you can
attach to intranet objects. You can apply as many tags as you want to to
objects, but each tag must be a single word--"foo bar" will be treated as
two separate tags, whereas "foobar" is a valid tag.

Tags are also case-insensitive, so "Foobar" is the same as "foobar",
"FOOBAR", or "FooBar".

A new object called a Saved Search lets you create lists of objects by
specifying tags that you want to find, locations that should be searched,
and some options for displaying the matching objects. Any objects with those
tags that are located within the selected locations (and their subfolders)
will be in the list.

That means, for instance, that you could put meeting minutes for a committee
in subfolders that store everything relating to particular meetings, but
still have a master list of every meeting minutes document. All you'd have
to do is tag all the meeting minutes documents with a particular tag, and
then create a Saved Search that looks for that tag.

Tags can currently be applied to HTML Documents, Images, Files, and Links
(and Folders, but you have to go the the Properties view to add them to a
folder). We may eventually add tags to just about every Intranet object, but
the current 5 seem like a good and useful start.

The tagging interface lets you either type your tags in directly, or toggle
them on or off by clicking on tags in a list of popular tags.

Choosing the right tag is a balancing act. If you make it too general (like
"document", and it gets appied to a wide variety of things, then lists based
on that tag may be too wide-ranging to be useful.

On the other hand, tags that are too narrowly focused (say,
"2007SpringMeetingMinutes") won't let you capture many related items in a
Saved Search list.

You also need to remember that anyone can tag anything with any tag, which
introduces a level of uncertainty into your searches if you are searching
the entire Intranet.

For example, the new Committees page is actually a Saved Search that looks
for the tag "CommitteeSite". Brian and I chose that tag to designate
committee sites instead of "Committee", because we expect that a lot of
people might use "Committee" as a tag for all sorts of committee-related
stuff, and we didn't want the site list contaminated by random committee
agendas, minutes, etc.

We expect to continue adding features to the tagging infrastructure. For
instance, when you use the search box, part of the results could be a list
of any matching tags, and each found item might include a list of it's tags,
with each tag a clickable link that would find everything with that tag.

TABS/LANDING PAGE

No really suggestions for the tabs changes. As for the landing page, I'm not sure what to put there mostly because I don't know how much my department is using the intranet.

I was going to suggestion looking at what other departments are doing with their page.

LOGIN

Would the My Account stuff need to go away if the left sidebar can be hidden?

TAGS

Also a tough thing since the idea is kind of new. I think it's one of those things people will have to use.

That was what Brian and I are leaning towards. Rwitti's not sold on the idea yet.

We're looking for input on that. Do you think it would cause problems if that whole block went away, and you had to log in using the link up by the search box, and links to your stuff were only in the Bookmarks tab?