The Austin Fire Department is featured in a research report by the Nielson Norman Group (NN/g) (www.nngroup.com) entitled “Usability of Intranet Portals – a Report From the Trenches" (www.useit.com/alertbox/portals.html) . The report offered recommendations for improving intranet portals based on 67 case studies showing best practices The Austin Fire Department is included because we upgraded the usability and usefulness of our intranet employee directory, implementing industry best practices. This report includes information and screenshots of our directory, which is used throughout the department--receiving about 100 unique visitors per day--and includes a search results page with employee photos that show as the user’s cursor hovers over an image icon on each record. Our users give consistent positive feedback--“Being able to see personnel photos is very helpful” “I use the export to excel feature a lot” “the updated query page is much better than the old one” “very clean” “very useful and easy to use” . The report was published on July 18 in Jakob Nielsen's ON-LINE Alertbox newsletter (www.useit.com/alertbox/) .