Searching is another big thing. Instead of making people go to one of a dozen places to search that specific site, I have a search box on the link page that people can use to search one of a dozen different internal sites. Some are pretty basic, just adding the search term to the query string and opening a new tab. Others try to be a little intelligent, for example looking at the term to see if it’s a ticket number and what type, a server, a knowledge article, or something else, and using the appropriate method in our ITSM tool to open it up. This alone makes me use my search instead of the ITSM tool’s search, because mine doesn’t require the user to navigate to the proper record type/table as a prerequisite to the search.
It’s an easy site to build and maintain, yet has become an indispensable part of many workflows. While I made it specifically for one team, I see it in bookmark bars of people across their organization all the time. I’ve also seen some of the little utilities used in other team’s demos, where my little page enables, in a small way, the new thing they are building and showing off.
phillipseamore•1h ago
lysace•1h ago
If they are good enough at the subject matter to be useful they invariably get sucked into it the actual development effort.
So you end up with people who aren't and then it doesn't really work.
So it needs to be a portion of e.g. some developer's time, not a separate job/profession.