The last few years has seen a proliferation of web-app development. Lots of productivity tools, to-do lists, online word processors and spreadsheets, presentation tools, groupware, calendars, etc. Lots of business software.
Noticeably absent are dedicated intranet tools. Software to help businesses get their shit together internally. A place to post common information, to have discussions, to share files, and possibly to share a calendar or important dates. There are definitely products out there, but this market doesn’t seem to have seen the same level of development as other business software.
When we were still doing client work back in the early 2000s we got a lot of calls about designing intranets. Everyone wanted an intranet. The employees we talked to loved their intranets too—their jobs depended on having access to bits of information, files, forms, etc. that were only available on their company intranet.
But since then I haven’t heard much noise from the intranet camp. Have people given up because the options were too complicated? Or have they built their own? Or are they piecing together blogs and wikis and file storage services and online calendars to get the job done?
What does your company or group use to keep your information together, centralized, and accessible to people you work with? Are you using something home grown? Something off the shelf? Something old? Something new? We’re curious.
Jake
on 21 Dec 07Read: If we built an intranet app – would you buy it?
Scott deVries
on 21 Dec 07Basecamp’s our intranet, basically. We store or files, info, and stuff all there. It’s all we need – everything else is on a central server.
Chris
on 21 Dec 07For better or worse…. Microsoft Sharepoint is gathering steam.
Colin Bartlett
on 21 Dec 07Intranets in their true sense are, I think, gone. Most corporate informational portal sites are now internet accessible so that employees, vendors, and partners can access information outside of a corporate LAN.
For our “intranet”, we use home-built software. Nothing off the shelf ever seemed to manage exactly what we wanted. And I’ve found it difficult to sign on to service-based offerings out of fear of not having control of our data’s destiny.
Shaun Kester
on 21 Dec 07There are always a multitude of commercial options available to us for intranet systems, but found that internally developed applications fit the bill better. In three year I’ve developed over 40 internal applications from file managers to compliance reports.
--Josh
on 21 Dec 07The latest versions of SharePoint just plain work for all business large enough to have IT departments that implement it for them. It’s actually a pretty well-designed product.
Nathan
on 21 Dec 07We just use a wiki.
Jim
on 21 Dec 07I agree with the comments on SharePoint, and this year we’ll be going to MOSS 2007. That doesn’t mean I necessarily LIKE SharePoint over much (and the admin side sucks rocks). But in a MS-stack shop like ours, it’s pretty much the winner by default.
Emily
on 21 Dec 07We use Basecamp…..so do most of our clients.
mattbucher
on 21 Dec 07I really hate Sharepoint. We have it, but we also use Documentum eRoom and I love it so much more. I pushed for our company to use a free open source solution, but there were security concerns.
Dave Aiello
on 21 Dec 07I’ve seen some pretty laughable attempts at building Intranets in small and mid-sized companies around Wikis.
There’s often senior-management support for the idea of organizing employee knowledge, but little appreciation of how successful Wikis operate.
John
on 21 Dec 07I work for IT at large university in the midwest, where you can image interconnectivity is a big deal. We use a mix of home-grown software and purchased solutions at all levels of use… all the way from enterprise apps to apps used by a few groups, we have custom and purchased solutions. Many users are requesting more and more connectivity apps like wikis and blogs, so we are still in the process of evaluating what to do for the entire campus, but it will be an off the shelf solution, either open source or commercial.
Intranet development is alive and well, and I would say more and more groups are turning to internal developers to make their applications to their spec and liking.
Jared
on 21 Dec 07I worked for Target corporate a couple years ago and they had a number of intranet sites focused around the major divisions within the company, marketing, IT, etc.
I work for a tiny e-commerce company now and we don’t have an intranet. As you may expect, we do have an admin backend to our site which has some features you’d find in an intranet site.
I suspect intranets still exist in larger companies where the business dictates the need for storing lots of common resources like forms and documents, however in smaller companies, it is probably cheaper to build out what you need piece by piece with online services.
Tim
on 21 Dec 07The only thing worse than SharePoint is everything else.
Brian
on 21 Dec 07We just implemented SharePoint, and our employees love it. They are asking many questions that start with “Can I do __?” and my answers are by and large “YES”.
Out of the box functionality is great. I can see a day when we will start to build custom web parts to add in, but there are so many third party ones that maybe we can just buy the things we might need instead of building. Much cheaper in the long run.
The only problem is the software is HUGE, which means if you don’t learn it, it looks like it won’t work for you. I have found every hour I spend learning something new about SharePoint has given back to me 3 fold in development time I would normally commit to solving business needs.
My 2 cents…
Kevin Marshall
on 21 Dec 07I don’t love SharePoint Server, but it does work well for setting up Intranets easily and allowing teams to have decentralized control to customize. Plus it integrates well with MS Office and Active Directory security. And I do love the search features. We don’t have to spend time tagging or categorizing docs since it indexes everything inside and you can find what is need quickly. Some areas though like the blogs & wikis are rather weak and custom webpart development can be frustrating. We use it internally to manage all our internal documentation, team project tracking, and management activities like business development & staffing
Dan Simard
on 21 Dec 07I used to work on an Intranet team a while ago and I think that most people got bored with the tools. There are hundreds of “out of the box Intranet” that are more a puzzle to install and maintain than anything else.
Users were disgusted by these Intranets and prefered to use good ol’ “shared directories” and emails. These tools are never offline for maintenance or upgrade or just down because the server is too busy trying to run the out-of-the-box misconfigured Intranet.
Adam
on 21 Dec 07We use SharePoint too. I tried to get my partner to use Basecamp, but he’s a ‘softie.
Strangely enough, it’s working quite well. It’s doing stuff that I’m not sure Basecamp would do as well… (certainly not as configurable).
Erik Mallinson
on 21 Dec 07At MIT a lot of the Institute-wide collaboration is done via internet, with a bit of it being paper-based. Individual departments (of which there are billions) are left to their own devices. In our case we’re trying to implement some web-based tools like Basecamp, as well as some complex Filemaker stuff that we share locally.
Nate Bird
on 21 Dec 07I work for a small business and we use a mix of commercial software, some internally designed apps, and a Mac Mini with some HDs attached via firewire. We have remote access to files and it is super simple.
We tried a wiki a couple years ago but it just wasn’t used… hmm maybe I should see if it is still running. :-)
Charles
on 21 Dec 07I work at a Fortune 50 Bank. In the last two years our intranet web sites has gone from a CMS back-end to Sharepoint in a big way. In some ways it is like a jump back into the 90’s. Instead of a consistent look and feel, most sites use the defaults but some are compleatly different.
PJ Foley
on 21 Dec 07We’re a specialized industry, so we contracted our own product, and are soon taking it to the public. The benefit of our system is that it’s not an intranet—we can use it to do our job locally and remotely. Maybe the intranet concept as a whole logically diffused into the internet as workforces became more telecommuters and outsourced.
Dean
on 21 Dec 07I built a Wordpress theme and configured it to use a combination of dated postings and static pages – has worked for us for over 2 years now. Easy.
Colin
on 21 Dec 07We are using a combination of SharePoint sites, Oracle portal, and static pages. We are currently working on moving portions of the static pages to SilverStripe.
Jon Maddox
on 21 Dec 07You guys killed the boilerplate intranet with Rails.
Back in 2005 when I was trying out this Rails thing, the first thing I did was use it to develop in-house applications. It was so rapid and so fun, I just kept going. I was able to develop friendly fun tools for little niches around the office. Everyone loved them.
The problem with a boilerplate intranet is that they’re not designed for anyone in particular. So they don’t really rock hard for anyone either. With Rails, a developer can create exactly what the office needs without a lot of overhead or cost.
I did that exact thing for a friend of mine because they said Basecamp was just too big and not in tune with their project management enough. So they dropped some coin and had me create a tool for their internal projects. Now they have exactly what they want, and moving into the future they can extend it exactly how they want.
Its just these cases that led me away from my fulltime day job to go solo. There are tons of people out there with needs for small tools that do exactly what they need for their business.
Ellen
on 21 Dec 07I work at a large Seattle e-commerce company, and we have an intranet that’s about 80% wiki, 10% Sharepoint, and 10% custom website (mostly for the internal corporate stuff). There’s also peoplesoft and accounting applications and stuff, but the main “intranet” is those three things.
Arthur Clemens
on 21 Dec 07We are using TWiki as intranet – it works good as communication and knowledge management tool. Simple to create web applications with blogging and RSS feeds.
But a lot of project related material is stored on the file server. We are looking for a better way to manage this.
Ellen
on 21 Dec 07Also email, a fucking lot of emails. That’s the real intranet for most companies.
Joshua Brewer
on 21 Dec 07One interesting blip on the radar is Socialcast. Putting an interesting twist on the traditional intranet. Seems to be getting some attention too.
Maybe intranets just needed some love.
Chuck McKinnon
on 21 Dec 07I know the silverorange guys have (had?) an award-winning intranet but you can’ t even find the link I posted from their new homepage.
James
on 21 Dec 07We’re a small company: we just sit down regularly and talk to each other, and occasionally email if there’s something larger to keep track of. Never forget that you don’t always need a software solution.
Adam Gregory
on 21 Dec 07Google Apps,
It works for everything we need it to do. Messaging, Calendars, Document Sharing, and it is all web based and requires little admin on our side.
Keith
on 21 Dec 07We have over 15,000 hand created HTML pages and about 5 PHP applications that drive our intranet. The intranet receives nearly 1 million hits daily on it.
You want to talk about the lack of intranet support… We have been searching for a CMS that can handle this kind of volume and the results have been shocking. Nobody has a tool that can do it as easily as we can hand building everything.
We’ve been really low-tech for our 15 content managers’ sake and have provided Dreamweaver Templates to them. The HTML behind the templates is ugly, but the functionality is skillset appropriate and the content comes out as the end user’s expect. So that’s the major plus to the system.
We’ve read through the Nielsen Norman Group’s “Best of Intranet” reports for 2006 & 2007. They basically found the same thing we are finding now. Everyone with an intranet that is as large as ours has ended up developing their own backend solution.
It’s very daunting. For a smaller company I would recommend cobbling together the components from the many excellent FOSS projects out there. Larger companies have to throw some resources at both investigating tools on the market and, more likely, developing their own internal solution.
Justin
on 21 Dec 07We (a small, non-centralized nonprofit) are using Basecamp, Google Apps, and a file server. That’s it, and I expect it to meet our needs for quite a while as we grow.
anil
on 21 Dec 07Trampoline Systems are doing interesting work in this area, bringing social tools to intranets via browser-based applications. I’ve met a number of their team since they work down the road from us, and I think they have an attractive vision for bringing business software an important social dimension, with an emphasis on web standards. I’ve not used their products myself yet but they include things like email management, wikis, blogs and search.
Broadly speaking, there is potentially lot of installation, integration and maintenance work required to get value out of this breed of software, which is why we use mainly homegrown or open-source components on our ‘intranet’ (it’s not a real intranet, it’s just a lot of tools on our boxes sitting behind our own auth layer). Wikis and tools like Trac are used in conjunction with our own substantial admin tools. Basecamp is also still used, though generally when a company reaches a certain size it’ll want to keep that stuff off hosted platforms and pull it in to the local network. It allows you to integrate user auth with the rest of the tools and do more things with the information. We may well have this requirement with Basecamp at some point in the future. If there was an installable version of Basecamp we would be using it today no question.
Allen Pike
on 21 Dec 07My job for the last 5 years has been working on custom intranets. I would say they’re more common than they used to be, but less noisy since they’re so easy to make. There’s many open source CMS options to build them on, and lots of powerful tools to make data-backed web apps (Rails, CakePHP, Django, etc.)
Neil Kelty
on 21 Dec 07I worked at Wachovia Securities as an Intern over the summer and there was a huge intranet It was one of the best designed and most useful websites I’ve used.
Everything was so easy to find.
Scott Smith
on 21 Dec 07Our company has about 1300 employees spread across 30+ sites. We are using PmWiki and WordPress. There’s also an old MoveableType deal some where in the mix.
We found the office managers were not willing to give edit rights on the wiki, so that is a bust for the most part. We are pushing the sites to use WordPress. The IT Dept does use PmWiki and that’s working out well.
Fortunately, there’s an LDAP plugin for WP and PmWiki can seamlessly auth to the AD—what a pain that was to setup. It is a struggle to get Open Source solutions to play nice with AD.
I’d rather switch all project management stuff to 37signals, but they won’t let the data out the door. So, email is our project management tool. A huge problem.
Erik Dungan
on 21 Dec 07Seems like a lot of the big companies are using Sharepoint and Documentum eRoom.
eRoom sucks. I had to use it because our small biz was partners with a big software company (name rhymes with “Flah Dobee”). There was nothing useful it did that basecamp can’t do, and the layout stunk.
When I was IT at a call center for a Fortune 100 company (they drive brown trucks all over town), I constantly brought Intranet ideas to IT managers and execs. It was impossible to get anything approved. Their intranet was nothing more than directories–no real “apps”. That was in 2000, though.
Like one commenter said, a pw-protected internet app is just as good … the only real benefit I see now is if you need to leverage the high-speed LAN to push really big files/data.
Jamie
on 21 Dec 07Crate and Barrel has a homegrown one. But we use Basecamp too! What’s up JF and ML?
someone
on 21 Dec 07We use wikis + email + whiteboards + online file transfer services (we are a very small company).
David E. Weekly
on 21 Dec 07I’m the CEO of PBwiki and we have thousands of businesses who use us for their intranet; hosted wikis beat the cost and hassle of behind-the-firewall collaboration deployments and take care of the security, scalability, and upgrade issues to reduce hassle. Could our solution stand some improvement to serve as an ideal intranet? Absolutely; but its simplicity already makes it a decent choice over much heavier weight alternatives for collaboration.
Michele
on 21 Dec 07We use PBwiki – http://www.pbwiki.com for our Intranet. We use it to communicate with our staff in 6 timezones and all vendors.
Jim
on 21 Dec 07Yeah. For the big “enterprise” companies that would contract with someone to build an intranet… they’re already in bed with Microsoft, so they’re using some variant of Sharepoint.
Often regretting it. But that’s what’s gathering frightful steam.
Alex Bunardzic
on 21 Dec 07I gotta be honest with you—Rails changed everything. Finally, here is a platform that allows anyone to build a networked solution (read: a web site), usually in less than a week (if it ends up taking more than a week to build, my advice would be to go back and revisit your problem and try to break it up further).
What we ended up doing is string together an open-ended number of stand-alone web sites, and let them talk to each other and remix and mash up via REST.
That arrangement sort of reminds me of the way people used to build OO applications in the good old client/server days. Design and build a boatload of specialized objects, each being capable of independently standing on its own, and yet being fully civilized in their ability to talk freely to each other.
We now view each web site as being akin to a standalone software object. We then mix and match those sites in any manner and order we find appropriate. Before you know it - voila! - you got yourself a full blown intranet.
Chris Bonney
on 21 Dec 07My big idea is that we just have the web. Forget the labels, let’s get the information how and when we need it. Clearly, products exist, but why call them intranet or extranet or web-based? Let’s call it information sharing and consider it all part of the bigger picture.
tyler rooney
on 21 Dec 07I’m guessing I work for the same “large Seattle e-commerce company” that Ellen works and we’re doing a push over to Sharepoint because every wiki system we’ve tried is too frustrating to use for a lot of people.
That said, Sharepoint is exploding. I’ve heard this from both Microserfs and people who do Sharepoint consulting. I guess it works “good enough” because it’s certainly not great.
Bill Seitz
on 21 Dec 07Trac (wiki + issue tracker) file server
that’s all folks
Frank Gilroy
on 21 Dec 07My current company (very large health insurance company) has Sharepoints and Wikis but nothing very well organized. Sharepoints tend to be filled with tons of documents (also developed in MS products) that are nearly impossible to find unless you know where they are. The Wikis tend to be full of poorly organized an often out-dated information. I think the most important thing to have on an Intranet would be something like what Google Mini provides but I’ve yet to work in a company that has bought one, which sucks. I look at the intranets I’ve seen the same way I do the Internet. The more “compteition” there is in terms of the applications and technologies the better, but something has to try and tie it all together.
Jay
on 21 Dec 07@SharePoint users – I’m really curious as to how much you have been able to customize the horrid MS default templates/setup with its 4 menus, confusing columns etc., and make it functional and appealing to look at.
Can anyone share a screen grab or two for inspiration?
It would be very much appreciated. Thank you.
Kevin
on 21 Dec 07There are several very nice Intranet features in Mac OS X Leopard Server. I’ve never used any, but judging from the popularity of the recent free seminar series, I’d image lots of people use that.
Patrick Berry
on 21 Dec 07We’re rolling out Confluence from Atlassian. Yeah, it’s “just” a wiki, but it has all the controls and authentication that we need. Plus, it integrates with our issue tracker and if we decide we need SharePoint, it will integrate with that too.
Keaka
on 21 Dec 07I agree with Kevin, Mac OS X Leopard Server has great intranet features that are super easy to use (for both the end user and administrator). It has wikis, file sharing, calendar server, etc. My favorite is the wiki server. It’s much more like an online word processor that creates pretty output rather than a traditional wiki. You don’t need to deal with any markup languages and it makes great use of AJAX to make content creation easy.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/wikis.html
Doug
on 21 Dec 07I like to use MediWiki + WordPress + PHP iCalendar.
14Dayz
on 22 Dec 0714Dayz for time tracking, Campfire for communication, Gmail and GCalendar and an internal Blog make up most of our intranet. We use Netvibes as a personal startpage. Basecamp is actually our extranet, a way to draw our customers, contractors and our team out together 24/7. We still build custom intranet solutions for our clients though.
14Billz
on 22 Dec 07There is Cisco owned Webex at http://www.intranets.com
BenT
on 22 Dec 07We use intranets.com…though it’s expensive and isn’t quite as customizable as one would like.
John Athayde
on 22 Dec 07My former employer went to SharePoint and it was an utter nightmare. We offered to make a straightforward simple intranet in a week (on the creative side) using some quick PHP hacking and MySQL, but nope. It had to go enterprise and it took four months to implement.
No one could find files they needed so it increased office email at that point. Yet HR called it a success.
So glad I’m not there anymore :)
Michelle
on 22 Dec 07@Ellen: Email really is our intranet.
We’re a tiny start-up so we use ad-hoc solutions that work fine, but I’m always paranoid that the sky will start falling. We use lots and lots of Gmail, Basecamp, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, a shared Delicious, and Skype for chat and filesharing.
David Andersen
on 22 Dec 07I’ve seen a few sharepoint sites at my clients and they all basically look like a less useful version of Explorer rendered in HTML. I’m assuming some people go a little beyond this? It hasn’t been impressive.
Also, most intranet sites I’ve seen at large corporate clients are nothing but siloed department/process websites cobbled together with master pages. Each individual site tends to have it’s own cryptic acronym for a name. The actual name is no clearer. In short, of the 20-30 F500 clients I’ve been at over the last 5 years, all of their ‘intranets’ are disorganized, confusing jumbles. People go to the file system just as often to get stuff.
Al
on 22 Dec 07Confluence rocks as an intranet.
Sage
on 22 Dec 07Our intranet is made up of one static HTML page with a few links to Excel spreadsheets. Yeah.
Bruce
on 22 Dec 07We have a simple, hacked intranet for our small ~30 person software consultancy. It strings together Bugzilla, Mediawiki, and a home-brew CRM system written in Php over the course of 5 years. We share files using a local Samba server, and backups are done via a simple set of Rsync scripts (and USB drives) in cohorts with our dedicated hosting providers Rackspace (web, svn) and Dreamhost (mail, and backup web).
For our CRM system, we would have used Rails had it been useful 4 years ago, but Php has done us well too. We keep it simple, and strongly based on our simple way of doing things. If we changed anything, it would be to offload our CMS, and find something that does issue/bug tracking in a reasonable way. FWIW we’ve tried a few commercial CMS/ticket systems, but have been disappointed overall.
I’ve helped companies using Sharepoint. Out of a few hundred local companies I’ve consulted for, only a handful have found good value in Sharepoint (given cost/benefit of getting it to useful), though the alternative of home-brewed intranets is as dismal given the difficulty in breeding your own (and keeping them healthy). Weeding the garden, so to speak, is the biggest reason for failure I’ve seen in intranets in general: they become a mess of junior admin code, and outdated documentation. It takes a group focus on keeping the stuff useful, and lots of regular blitzes.
Mike
on 22 Dec 07I work at a large company (over 50K people) and we use crap from Open Text. I’m not really sure what is important to the decision makers who purchase such systems, but it is certainly not the end-user experience. It has wikis, blogs, forums, version control, workflow management, ..., blah, blah, blah. All are functional, but none are very usable and features lag those available on the open web by over 12 months.
Jack
on 22 Dec 07we use sharepoint.
Spongebob Squarepants
on 22 Dec 07Since most of here love Apple stuff, this looks like a good solution for Intranets – http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/server.html
Ismo
on 22 Dec 07Our intranet (and hole IT system) is basicly Basecamp + Highrise + Google Apps + few financial web apps like invoicing and banking + few homemade web apps for our special needs.
We don’t need (or want) one app to do it all.
Bob Jelica
on 22 Dec 07Whole things is ajaxfied (where it matters, not just for the sake of it). Some would even call it a web2.0 intranet ;)
Anyways, i’m really pushing hard with managment to open-source it, and they seem positive right now, mostly ‘cause we use a lot of OSI tools in our company and managment seem to see the importance of giving back. We’re not there yet though, need to convince them a little bit more ;)
Rails is great for these kind of apps actually, I was pretty much glueing together modules (like beast, ferret etc.) instead of re-inventing the wheel.
If you would like to do something similiar, and can’t wait for us to open-source it, I’ll be glad to help you out!
Cheers, Bob
Bob Jelica
on 22 Dec 07Sorry for spam, just one comment to my post above, we do not have any document managment or likewise, there are better tools for that already available anyways….
Cheers, Bob
Josh A.
on 22 Dec 07I’m currently working on a wiki, and I think it would be a good Intranet.
I don’t think that Intranets are bad, there just needs to be a better one on the market. JotSpot is interesting, but they don’t seem to care about bloat. In my opinion, wikis are good for Intranets because they are a place for discussion, collaboration, and file sharing.
Chris
on 22 Dec 07We use Vanilla Forum for our “notes” and we use Google Calendar, Todoist, and some homegrown apps for handling time records.
SR
on 22 Dec 07As a veteran of ‘big industry’ and now an IT Risk Consultant, I’ve seen the following:
1. Network file folders with MS Office docs of various kinds; 2. Microsoft ‘Sharepoint’ archives (which absolutely suck).
When I proposed alternatives, esp. for my employer (Basecamp would be a good fit for many projects) I was told that it had to be an in-house app. because they were concerned about the risk of putting their data in a ‘public’ place – any third party – especially if it included client data. The perceived risk was too great.
Unfortunately, when creating in-house apps to address needs, my employer refuses to even look at the landscape of ‘public’ web apps, so their most recent product offering – a SOX compliance tool – bears absolutely no resemblance to the ‘Web 2.0’ tools out there, despite being web based. It has a laborious, clunky, counterintuitive layout and violates just about every principle in ‘Getting Real’. It also sells for huge $ and is amazingly popular. It better be, given they hired >30 full-time staff to develop and maintain it.
No one is paying attention in ‘big corporate’ and will probably not do so until small, smart firms come in, beat them up and take their lunch money. I will be very happy when that happens.
David Lewis
on 23 Dec 07Wikis! You have your answer.
But wikis are not working uniformly well everywhere, because not that many manufacturers have realized how potent a tool for intranets they can be and so have not targeted that market. For example, one of the leading wikis (featurewise), has no appropriate access control feature for some of the more important intranet needs such as restricted, read-only documents. Others have no access control at all—they’re just for public free-for-alls.
So, when’s 37S gonna do a wiki right? Or, are you gonna wait for Google to bring out JotSpot as the hub of all their apps, and watch your business go bye-bye? Are you afraid if eating your own lunch? Well, you know the answer to that one!
George
on 23 Dec 07I’m sure I won’t be the first in this thread to say it, but the intranet turned into the company wiki. As someone who tends to the one in our studio, I’ll say that the useability is pretty dire, so it’s pretty intimidating for your average non-tech head. So if you are thinking of competing, I think you’ll find there’s fertile ground.
FWIW, the most important feature for my boss is “can you persuade everyone in the studio to use it”. (We are only 20 people, but will be 75 in 5 years time.)
Obviously you are competing with free, but I doubt that’ll bother you now, since it’s never bothered you before. Like I say, it’d be incredibly easy to compete on useability, and setup is also quite-the-bitch, so you can sell it on the cost savings there.
anonymous
on 23 Dec 07wikis, microsoft sharepoint 2003/2007, lots of home grown portals for everything else, and enterprise google to keep it all together :)
Rob Stanton
on 23 Dec 07I’ve done 4 intranets over the years, each one had over 1000 users (and one 9000+). I think one reason you don’t hear so much about them is the technology side is not on the cutting edge. The key things to master for successful intranets are information desigh, dealing with internal politics and business change management (comms, training etc.), all very untrendy! For smaller orgs the 37 signals approach is spot on and I could see ‘pre-canned’ intranets being successful if targeted at particular sectors, e.g. managing a studio. For large organisations a Facebook approach would be the way to go, some key features everyone needs and a platform to develop specialised apps.
Tom
on 23 Dec 07We’re a bit unique in the fact that we’re going with a homegrown solution that we eventually plan to sell as “shrink-wrap” software. We’ll be taking advantage of as many existing solutions as possible and stitching them all together with common session management and so forth. It will also be a platform from which you can look out over and manage your entire domain of websites, applications, feeds, e-mail, source control… etc.
So, I guess we’re hoping Intranet isn’t dead yet ;)
Charlie
on 23 Dec 07The company I work for now uses Sharepoint. I guess it works better than nothing. It mostly get utilized like a file share. So people create a document in office and post it to Sharepoint.
What I’d like to see is something like ClearSpace (combination wiki, blogs and forums). If I’m looking something up on the intranet, I don’t want to have to download it and open it up with another applications. I just want to read it.
Brad
on 23 Dec 07We are currently trialing Conflulence by Atlassian software. Its the best enterprise wiki software we found. They just released integration with Sharepoint, so it might be a solution for the wiki/blog glue for those using SP.
Tom H.
on 23 Dec 07We use basecamp and highrise.
Ideally, we would use backpack since most of our employees and customers won’t take the time to utilize Basecamp’s full functionality… they won’t even use 25% of it. However, Backpack is very limited as far as sharing with clients. We need the permissions and projects in Basecamp, formatted more like backpack… well, we don’t NEED it but we want it. Basecamp gives us everything we need and quite a bit more.
We need writeboards, file sharing, messages, email TO:, and sometimes calendars. Aside from writeboards, everything else could be on one page.
Karl
on 24 Dec 07Interesting… not one person mentioned Notes/Domino. I can’t believe all those installations from the ‘90s are gone?!?
Shaun
on 24 Dec 07Confluence is excellent. Quick setup, easy to administer, very powerful. We’ve had great success with it as an intranet.
Chris McGrath
on 24 Dec 07ThoughtFarmer is a new solution specifically for Enterprise 2.0 intranets. I guess we’re still a bit under-the-radar, as we’re only about a year old, but we have many fascinating clients. Here’s a case study of one.
Nicholas
on 24 Dec 07There are tons of tools for this – some of them even really well done. But they all lack a decent, simple but flexible timesheet solution.
I don’t need document sharing, chat, email, or project management. I’ve got other software, hardware or processes that tackle all of that better than any web-based, all-in-one intranet could ever hope to do.
Just give me shared calendaring and timesheets.
Michael Sigler
on 24 Dec 07Just saw this post and have to give more props to Clearspace. As someone who is involved with its development, I can honestly say that it demolishes any sort of “intranet” that I’ve seen before. I’m intensely proud to work with it and believe it to be the sort of internal and external productivity app that I’ve always wanted to use. Wikis and other tools alone just aren’t enough. You really need something that fits everything together in a logical and seamless manner.
Charlie – feel free to contact me with any questions. I’m curious where you first heard of us. :)
Joseph Blackovi
on 24 Dec 07Wikis seem to be the quick and easy way to go with an Intranet. Central Desktop gives us the best of lots of worlds – wiki, intranet, project management tools. Highly recommended.
Andy Poots
on 24 Dec 07We’ve been using SharePoint 2003 for four years now as our corporate intranet platform. We originally designed it to provide one top-level group-wide site, and 8 divisional / group-function sub-sites for approx 1000 employees. Since then it’s scaled really well. We now have approx 6500 employees and approx 100 subsites running on the same installation.
We’re now well into our new intranet project to roll our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 across approx 40 offices around the world.
Have found the product to just be getting stronger and stronger, is highly customisable and highly scalable, and the development tools and office integration are extremely robust.
Compared to all the other market offerings out there, SharePoint simply stands out from the crowd as a better ,stronger, well-supported technology to invest in, unlike most of the flash-in-the-pan open source technologies that come and go every other day of the week, or big, slow and clunky commercial alternatives.
Microsoft SharePoint is pretty much becoming the de facto standard for intranets / corporate portals, just as Microsoft Office is the de facto standard for corporate productivity.
Morning Toast
on 24 Dec 07As a long-time Intranet Admin and developer, our company’s intranet (media company) served as half-portal, half-dev platform.
The portal linked to legacy apps, but everything else was custom built and integrated into the intranet. We (I) used the intranet as a framework for development. The applications could thus not be separated from the intranet and function.
For a while this was great (and still would be ideal) as custom apps insure it does exactly what the user base needs, but The Man put the kabash on intranet development a little over a year ago. Mostly because he didn’t “trust” inhouse development, or as he put it, “we’re not a development shop.”
As true as that may be, if inhouse development is fostered then the money saved will be great, both in terms of software cost and productivity. I have since left that position (it was eliminated) and now the intranet sits rotting. Apps are still being used and posts still flow regularly, but it’s stagnant despite that employees want/need new applications to help them.
I loved making intranet applications and working internally. To me making things to help people with their work is far more rewarding that a revenue-generating project. My problem was I had a tough time putting a hard number of the value of the intranet. Of course, to this day I still believe it wouldn’t have made a difference.
I think intranets are a very underused and undervalued tool in business, big or small. Even with a one or two person intranet team, the overhead is relatively small and the return is great.
Tom G.
on 24 Dec 07While I don’t feel Sharepoint is generally the best tool to use as the basis for an Intranet, there is a very important strength you non-Sharepoint people out there need to recognize about Sharepoint.
Microsoft Office is by far the current leader in the word processor /spreadsheet/presentation graphics space. Microsoft is the only company that can and has changed Office to work with intranet software designed to encourage collaboration.
When you use Office to open a file in a shared document workspace in Sharepoint (think web based folder), specific features become available in Office apps. The files are not in some folder somewhere on a sever with generic security priveleges, they’re stored in a searchable Sharepoint database and only available to the collaboration team for that workspace. Gone are the days of a proliferation of different versions of files on servers, local hard drives, email attachments, etc. Security is managed ad-hoc by team leaders instead of through requests to IT. The Office Track Changes feature works like a charm to track all changes made by various members of a team. It truly is a major paradigm shift in collaboration and file management.
This is why Sharepoint is the tool of choice for document collaboration in most corporate settings, even with its shortcomings. We strongly recommend it for a limited set of business requirements.
That being said, you better be ready to drink the Microsoft Kool-Aid because all users have to be licensed Active Directory users. Most mature intranets serve not only employees, but vendors, partners, and customers. It is not practical to add these outsiders to a your Active Directory domain and therefore Sharepoint system.
As a general purpose portal it is brutal to customize. You pretty much are forced to use FrontPage – no joke and I don’t care how smart you think you are – its designed that way. There are tons of drag & drop widgets you can add to your pages, but if you want to make your own, you’d better be a highly skilled Microsoft .Net programmer. Also while it is possible (I’ve done it with and without FrontPage) to substantially change how it looks, it’s not worth the hassle. Moving and renaming files is a pain in the ass. Did I mention it was slow???
Also be aware that there are two flavors of Sharepoint, Team Services (free) with Office and Windows Server, and Portal Server (expensive).
As an aside my company has developed portal software that we have reused for dozens of companies including very large corporations. It handles thousands of users daily with a vast number of pages and files without scalability issues.
Clare Warburton
on 24 Dec 07we’re looking at sharepoint, but its price point is too much for the small company i work for. there are also online social network sites we looked into, but they are not so great with managing files … currently we are using a mixture of wiki’s, shared drives and email to manage internal knowledge, as you can imagine it doesn’t work too well … the perfect tool is most definitely not on the market yet … :)
Ted
on 25 Dec 07@Clare Warburton
If your company is small, you can use WSS (Windows Sharepoint Service) for free (provided you have Windows 2003 server).
WSS is the basic version of the Sharepoint family. Works out of the box. Easy to install. No SQL Server needed (but you definitely can use SQL Server Express anyway and it’s free as well).
WSS comes with Wiki, RSS and Blog as well.
I’ve used the following intranet software:
At Nokia -> MediaWiki, NWiki, TWiki At Microsoft -> SharePoint (duh?) At some company -> JotSpot At MS shop -> SharePoint At a university -> Basecamp
By far, Sharepoint is the easiest one I use. It scales well for big company. Microsoft has 60k employees with offices around the world and searching information is a snap. The Sharepoint installation I used at Microsoft also supports Organization hierarchies (so you can check who my supervisor is) and has a “social networking” element to it. It integrates VERY well with Office apps. I can’t mention every single “integrated feature” of SharePoint + Office because there are too many.
JotSpot is slow due to their AJAX stuff. It comes to a point where it is very annoying to edit a “page” in JotSpot because their auto-safe is slowing me down.
The problem with Wiki is that it doesn’t “map” well with engineers/developers brain. I prefer Filesystem/Structured/Folder approach than Wiki. Wiki is very messy unless there’s some sort of “Rules” how to organize information (i.e. creating a page).
Lastly, Basecamp is simple to use. Unfortunately, once you have plenty assets/items in it, it’s a little bit messy to identify information. To make matter worse, Basecamp has no search feature, which I think is one of the key to an intranet solution. So in conclusion, Basecamp does not scale.
I used Google Group as well. I think Google Group is better and simpler than Basecamp in terms of features. Unfortunately Google Group has issue with e-mail; it chokes big time. I had to wait for 1-2 days before an e-mail is sent to my GMail account regarding new changes/items.
For those who are considering to use SharePoint. If you’re not anti-MS or Linux zealots kind of type, I’d suggest you to use it. Microsoft gives SharePoint the highest priority of all MS Office products. Any features to be implemented for the future Office products must involve SharePoint so all MS engineers must design the features with SharePoint in mind.
Anon
on 25 Dec 07I work at a large web company. We develop our intranet without any external help :-) A combination of Twiki, Bugzilla and custom PHP apps drives most of our business.
JF
on 25 Dec 07Basecamp has no search feature
Yes it does. You can search inside any project or across all projects at once. Click the “Search” tab inside any project or on the Dashboard.
Doug
on 25 Dec 07Like others have mentioned, we bang together specialized apps for internal work with Rails.
Dunrie
on 25 Dec 07We use a Socialtext wiki for holding general process/background and then basecamp for organizing individual projects. We’re experimenting with Google docs for some doc storage, but we don’t have it fully integrated into our process yet.
Ted
on 26 Dec 07JF,
My bad, yes, after I revisited the pages again I saw the search tab. Kinda hidden a bit from the first page after I logged-in.
Mike
on 26 Dec 07We use Confluence to store most all of our common, company info. We love it, too!
Anonymous Coward
on 26 Dec 07Interesting… not one person mentioned Notes/Domino. I can’t believe all those installations from the ‘90s are gone?!?
Notes is the worst enterprise software product I’ve ever used. It is the definition of non-intuitive. I’d definitely suggest my enemies install it and use for all critical operations.
Roger
on 26 Dec 07i think most mega software brands are realising that mega systems for intranets, knowledge management and the like are becoming increasingly hard to sell successfully. at the same time, companies are finally working out that success in these things is down to behaviour and so they need to build communities where the people are.
i say this as an ex-manager in IBM comms, where the question at this time of year was ‘how do we get people to use our intranet this year?’ usually this involved a lame promotion or creating some kind of gaming that would (hopefully) distract the masses from where they really wanted to be. but in reality it always failed.
smart firms (i now run one) are using stipped down tools like yours. things that are ‘good enough’ rather than all-encompasing….and are OK with the fact that employees want to do their own thing in communicating elsewhere.
so facebook plug-ins and the like will be interesting things to investigate in the future. instead of building temples, we should be building little tool kits for sharing/communicating that can plug into all kinds of different forums, messaging platforms, etc.
ps: when i started out running a firm i wanted to build the ibm experience all over again – brand everything, nail every interaction with MeCo in my own environment. but i realised the objective was broken – it didnt help my customers. so now we share stuff using basecamp … and it rocks. what really matters is that people can just use it. that’s a more profitable experience for my business than forcing them to work totally in a ‘my brand’ space with a piece of software that doesnt work as well.
Justin
on 26 Dec 07We’re a mid-sized online national advertising company. Currently we use a whole slew of different intranet technologies.
From our corporate team we have a legacy, custom-built site that houses our directory and corporate forms. On top of that we also have the last Sharepoint release for document management. Both these systems will likely be dropped in favor of the new Sharepoint Portal system (mostly for it’s OWA and AD integration and form workflow).
What’s happening though, is a shift from corporate control of our system to individual control by different divisions. Our division is very tech heavy. We have three or four different basecamp implementations, our own sharepoint universe, two different wikis, three Pligg implementations, Business Objects XI, various different blogs and two different IBM websphere Extranet portals.
In this new environment (one that’s IBM websphere-centric), it’s likely that we’re going to start to investigate software like Quicker which can handle doc mangement, blogs, wikis, on top of WCM’s already stellar portal system as a way of tying together all of our different systems.
Kristine
on 26 Dec 07Is anyone out there using Alfresco?
Matt
on 26 Dec 07I was actually just asked to design an intranet system for tracking in-house art requests at a large newspaper. They had been using Lotus Notes which was very expensive so the time had come to ditch it for something lighter.
We ended up distilling the requirements as far down as possible and I then wrote a PHP/MySQL app to handle everything. The response has been great and we should be able to make the switch sometime in early 08.
This past year we also made the switch to a PHP based system for handling customized multimedia presentations. I see the vast majority of our internal projects moving away from commercial apps to homegrown PHP tools.
shennyg
on 27 Dec 07At my work, the largest AD in the world, we use MOSS 2007.
It is a lot better than 2003 but I am always telling the clients we can do it out of the box. But when we try to implement it, M$ hits us with some sort of show stopper…
Then we throw our Developers at it.
Shen
This discussion is closed.