Can Crappy Intranets Be Saved By Web 2.0 and Social Software?

During the past year, many IT departments came to a grim conclusion: corporate intranets had become irrelevant and useless. In an attempt to depart from boring phone directories and web-pages that only IT could update, we saw an uptick in the corporate adoption of web-based social software such as wikis, blogs and social networking profiles, all brought in to make intranets better by empowering employees to contribute user generated content. Here are a few case studies that come to mind: We saw a communications firm, which had 60 separate offices, use social networking technologies from Microsoft SharePoint and Newsgator (which provides RSS) to build an internal social network where users shared links and connected with others in the company who shared their same expertise. We examined a marketing firm that had previously... [read full story]