This is a grab-bag of new feature ideas for the Purdue Engineering intranet that occurred to me while I was attending the Nielsen Norman Group's Intranet Usability session at their 2006 Usability Week conference. If any of them genrate enough enthusiasm, they might spawn a more detailed proposal.

-Hilary

• I really want to link our People listings to a Google map of campus. Using Google's API, we should be able to hilight the building a person's office is in. A reverse lookup might also be possible: click on a building on the campus map and get an alphabetized list of everyone with offices in the building.
• An area where people can offer seminars, workshops, or classes on their hobbies. (Sort of a specialized form of classified ad.) Anyone could pick a topic and post it to see if anyone's interested. The intranet Form object that we're planning could be used for sign up, and would also make it easy for the teacher to contact the students.
• Make an improved version of the RDB Listing—call it a People List. The main difference would be that you could choose multiple RDB groups, and add individual people in the same way you add administrators and viewers.
• Absence lists that would display scheduled absences (vacations, leaves, out-of-town trips) for people in People Lists. Absences could be added either by an administrator working with a People List, which might affect only that list, or by the person taking the absence, in which case it should appear anywhere they are listed.
  
• Perhaps your portal page could have a widget for adding your absences.
• Make it easier to email intranet users. For instance, to accommodate users who are on the road, set up mailto: links so that they can open a small mail form instead of launching an email client. Make the choice a user preference, and put a link on the mail form that will open a mail client, so they don't need to change the preference if they only want to use their client once in a while. Also let them set a preference for auto-CC:ing themselves, so they'll have a copy in their client if they use the web form. People Lists could have checkboxes and buttons for "Email Selected" and "Email All"
• Add a "Category" property to Forums, so that threads can be presented in categorized lists? (This may not be needed. You could do it already by simply adding one Forum per category to a folder. Perhaps it should just be a guideline: make sub-forums for topics, so that users don't get presented with one long list of threads with no organization to the topics.)
• Tell users why they've been automatically logged-off if their session times out. Something like a timer script on every page that runs when the page has focus: if it hit's the timeout period, it does an Ajax call to see if you're still logged in, and either resets itself or displays the message. (Done)
  
• Is there any need for an acronym directory? Is there a college-wide set of acronyms that everyone should know, but might not?
• It would be nice to be able to specify whether an edit qualifies as an "update". If I have an announcements folder sorting by date, i'd rather not change the Publish Date to force a significant update to the top of the list. Perhaps an "Updated Date" property?
• The general search should, perhaps, categorize it's search results:
  People | Groups | Documents?