Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Challenges for the Information Architect

The flip side of this problem is how these numbers affect the people who are responsible for making Microsoft’s content, or aggregating that content into portals. Let’s make another comparison to the broader Web. Building and maintaining the Yahoo! portal has been a huge undertaking, spanning years and a gigantic collection of content—the Web as a whole. MSWeb is a portal too, and though 8,000 sites is a much more manageable number than what Yahoo! faces, consider the varying motives and concerns of those who own and maintain those independent sites. While Yahoo! can now get away with charging sites for inclusion in its directory, Microsoft can’t charge or compel site owners within the company to register. Instead, the MSWeb team has to create incentives for participation in its model. But the owners of the intranet’s various sites are too distracted by other concerns (such as serving their own constituencies) to consider how their site fits into the bigger picture of Microsoft’s intranet.

When a site is brought into the MSWeb fold, it comes with its own information architecture. Its organization and labeling systems and other tricky information architecture components must be integrated into the broader MSWeb architecture or be replaced altogether. For example, as many as 50 different variants of product vocabularies had been created in the Microsoft intranet environment. Fixing such problems is a messy and complicated challenge for any information ...