The Workplace Blog

A recent Business Week cover story on recruiting and holding onto great people talks about how Oil-field services giant Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB ) uses a search tool on their HR Intranet to find talent within their organization. Schulmberger is available to continously staff projects successfully by using the custom built search tool to match project needs with employee skill sets.

In conducting a search the intranet connects the user to a database that marries human resources information concerning people’s past job performance and salary with each worker’s own curriculum vitae. All employees write their own, generally covering their career goals, family, past assignments, professional affiliations, publications, patents granted, and hobbies. Instead of the mug shots that populate most in-house directories, people often send personal photos. One man holds up a fish caught on vacation. Read the full article at Business Week.

The Federal Times, a publication targeted towards managers in the Federal Government has published an article on how to secure information on an intranet. Peter McKay of Watchfire, Mass who has written the article recommends a five step to effective manage the compliance risks.

Google and Sun have joint forces to combat the dominance of Microsoft on the corporate desktop. A complicated deal struck between the two serves as the first step for both companies to fight Microsoft using Sun’s Star Office and Google’s brand. Apparently Star Office which is Sun’s alternative to Microsoft Office has had 50 million downloads in the last year.

Bob Lord, President East and Shiv Singh, Director Enterprise Solutions of Avenue A | Razorfish will be presenting at KM World 2005 this fall.

Using case studies such as Genentech’s sales force dashboard, Microsoft’s Partner Point, Thomson’s employee portal, Western Union’s knowledge intranet, and others from Fortune 500 companies, they will illustrate tips and techniques for creating productivity-enhancing intranets and extranets.

In a testament to the value of enterprise intranets, ABN AMRO Mortgage’s Affinity Lending Group and AT&T is offering a private-label version of mortgage.com to AT&T employees. The private-label version is available via the AT&T corporate intranet. In addition to getting mortgages, AT&T employees can access a wide-range of mortgage tools via their Intranet including online mortgage application submission, interest rate quotes and mortgage calculators. Read the full article at Real Estate Magazine.

Verity Inc. announced that Eletrobras Termonuclear S.A., a nuclear power utility whose majority owner is the Brazilian government, hasimplemented Verity(R) K2 Enterprise (K2E) software to provide search and classification on its main intranet Web site that connects to different data sources, including its operating reports.