Hello Geoff
I used to be a big fan of Intranets, and bascially i still am, having implemented 3 or 4 of them. The thought is that having your QMS in pretty colours in peoples faces all day will enourage them to use it or read it.
My experience is that this has absolutely no influence on the employee take-up of a QMS. They simply will not go in on their own and start refreshing their minds how a procedure should work. If you really want to improve the take-up you will probably have to go back to direct training with hardcopies.
Their is no doubting the usefulness of on-line manuals for the Management Representative, for distributing new versions and making sure that the Manual is up-to-date.
My feeling is that you can implement Intranets in two ways, clever and high-tech or simple and low-tech. If you sit down with an EDP expert he will almoist certainly push you down the route of Hyperlinks etc.
If you have the technology internally to handle this, go ahead. If not keep in mind that the system will have to be frequently updated if you want it to 'live'. In this case hyperlinks and their like are a pain.
Nowaday i always link from the Intranet Page to an Explorer Folder. Yes i know, not very pretty, but at least it means that the documents can be created in a format that nearly everybody can use Word/Visio/Excel, and i can control the access/read/write rights very easily.
Beware of doing too much in Html format, or all the changes, however small, will be routed over your desk, and this will strangle the updating of the system.
Regards
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Andy B
