Do you use an Internet/Intranet for sharing common information such as Company Standards?

Employees need easy access to standards that are used everyday. We maintain standards at SSW for any activity that can be standardized including coding practices, naming conventions, standard form layouts and documents. There are also internal standards like expense and leave procedures.

The first step is to use HTML rather than MS Word documents.

The second step is to think about location. Should it go on a website or Intranet? We believe in dividing it up into 2 groups:

• Public - e.g. /Standards
• Private - e.g. /Standardsinternal

The benefit with standards on the Web is to get feedback from other developers. See our SQL Server Naming Standards for an example. The third step is to decide on a web page theme so every page is consistent. I am continually surprised at how much time is wasted by managers explaining to web designers the corporate template - so get smart and do one up that they can follow.