Intranet quandary: When should you delete content?

The intranet team at international shipping company Maersk Line figured out a system for it, according to Lise Thygesen, the company’s intranet manager.

“A page can appear boring and still have a lot of visitors and positive comments,” she told the hosts of the October episode of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s IBF Live broadcast.

Maersk Line’s intranet, called Enable, aggregates quantitative and qualitative data-page views, comments, user feedback, clicks on “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” buttons at the bottom of each page—to determine just how popular particular pages are. On a metrics page that anyone in the company can access, employees can see a bar graph with three bars: promote, consider, and delete.

The promote bar shows the pages that are regularly updated, well liked and often visited, Thygesen said. The delete bar is for pages that are rarely updated and visited, and that get less-than-positive feedback. The bars are even color-coded.

“This is a way of managing the portal and the portal size, as well as usability,” she said.

Just because a page is in the delete pile doesn’t mean it gets chucked off the intranet immediately, Thygesen offered. Sometimes, pages simply get moved or reshuffled.