Getting the Most Out Of Expert Directories & Staff Profiles
27th December 2013

Sarah Dillingham asks how you can maximise the usage and usefulness of your organisation's staff or expert directory. She examines how companies can ensure their people data is current and how they can best manage information across multiple sources, from Active Directory to Outlook, intranets such as SharePoint, internal social media like Yammer and external social media sites including LinkedIn.

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Intranets: Don't Write the Obituary Just Yet
24th December 2013

It seems that a day doesn't go by without yet another website or blog trumpeting the death of intranets, or that intranets are becoming obsolete. The question is whether intranet managers should be up in arms about these posts, or is there some truth behind them? James Mullan explores the evolution of intranets, social enterprise networks, CMS and collaborative systems.

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Privacy vs Freedom - It's Going to Get Harder
24th December 2013

A whole range of recent actions by data protection authorities across the European Union show how seriously regulators continue to take privacy. Issues range over Dutch comment on the validity of online privacy policies, the need to train temporary staff in data protection and the possibility of stiffer United Kingdom penalties for breaches. But there are also conflicts - between economic freedom and unjustified surveillance, prevention of cybercrime and excessive intrusiveness, tougher privacy rules and legitimate journalism. As a new report from Outsell suggests, it's not necessarily going to be easy to work out what proposals will become law and what the best options for compliance might be.

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Eikon: Hitting the Headlines for all the Right Reasons
23rd December 2013

Andrew Grave examines the transformation of Eikon from a product with disappointing sales into a solid competitor to Bloomberg with over 100,000 installed terminals. The desktop market data solution for financial professionals now offers a wealth of content, secure messaging and powerful mobile apps. 

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Product Review of Euromonitor Passport: Executive Summary
20th December 2013

Whether you're looking for an overview of an industry or country or need more detailed analysis, Euromonitor's Passport offers a wealth of data on consumer-based market research. Providing statistics and analysis on 28 industries and with over 1,000 analysts covering 210 countries, Sophie Alexander's executive summary of Passport shows how it could be of value to any company that needs consumer market research data.

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Compliance - Cautionary Tales To Help Your Budget
20th December 2013

FreePint's Topic Series: Compliance in Context has drawn attention to an enormous range of useful sources and tools, but persuading enterprises to provide the budget to acquire them may still prove challenging. Some cautionary tales may help information managers demonstrate their value. Britain's new register of beneficial company ownership, criticism by the Financial Conduct Authority of weaknesses in financial firms' Anti-Money Laundering, bribery and corruption procedures, and the more proactive approach now taken by Britain's Revenue & Customs are among the developments covered. Governments' greater inclination to regulate to please voters, and banks' willingness to pay huge fines rather than fight the regulators, may also make spending on a few more compliance tools seem a bargain by comparison.

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Merger Mania in Biopharma: Will Information Professionals be Victims, Witnesses or Winners?
20th December 2013

With biopharmaceutical companies under pressure to maintain revenues and suffering from the upcoming expiry of key patents, more mergers and acquisitions are likely to take place. Yulia Aspinall examines how information professionals can put their skills to good use to change the challenge of possible redundancy into an opportunity, where the information services team emerges stronger post M&A.

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Product Review of Euromonitor Passport: Outputs, Pricing, Help & Contact Details
20th December 2013

Examining Euromonitor Passport's output options, help and pricing, Sophie Alexander finds that the help options have improved significantly since FreePint's 2011 review with a number of videos now available in seven languages, covering aspects such as manipulating statistics and creating custom datasets. Help is also available from every screen and covers areas such as methodology, which includes a detailed description of how the global market research database specialist obtains its data.

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FreePint Report: Product Review of Euromonitor Passport
20th December 2013

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Securing Senior Management Buy-In
19th December 2013

The recent ASLIB AKISS conference gave delegates the opportunity to share ideas with peers and hear from speakers their views on the best way to secure management buy-in for projects both small and large. Richard Newton introduced a valuable three-step process to identify what you want supported, who you want to support you and how you plan to get the support you want. The SLA's president-elect, Kate Arnold, highlighted survey findings from the SLA-FT research into the evolving value of information management. She discussed how the results show that library staff must become client-centric decision enablers who are able to communicate, understand the business and present well.

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