As Martin highlights, there are perhaps a million intranets in the world, but very few books to guide the work of those responsible for managing all these sites. What the intranet community (and industry) needs are good intranet books; thankfully this is such a book.

Intranets are not like websites. Hidden away within organizations, it is difficult for teams to learn from others, and to avoid reinventing the wheel. This has been the biggest contributor to the relatively slow pace of intranet evolution, leaving internal (enterprise) sites lagging far behind publicly visible websites.

Organizations cannot survive without their intranets. Without these invaluable internal sites, there would be no place to house the thousands of forms, policies, instructions, tips, guidelines, processes and tools that make organizations tick.

While no organization I know would seriously consider turning off their intranets, few sites are truly loved. They are often taken for granted, sometimes ignored, and very rarely given the resources to flourish.

Part of the problem is that even the teams that run intranets struggle to succinctly articulate the value and importance of their sites. It can also be hard to uncover best practices that support much-needed business cases and resource requests.

For all these reasons, I would argue that the starting point for delivering successful and valuable intranets is to better share expertise within the intranet community. One of the most effective ways of doing this is via books such as this one.

I've known Martin for quite a few years now, and he started working on intranets long before that. There are few who can claim more than a decade's professional intranet experience, making Martin ideally placed to write this book.

On behalf of the intranet community, I thank Martin for writing such a useful book, and look forward to the positive impact it will have on teams around the globe.