Sean R. Nicholson

First, let me start off with a bit of a disclaimer. I’m not an anti-Facebook zealot and my goal isn’t to discourage the use of Facebook by companies and organizations. To the contrary, one of the biggest roles of my job is to explain how social media channels can be used effectively by organizations and within organizations. So, with that said, my goal with this series of posts is to educate anyone considering the use of Facebook as their corporate Intranet to seriously reconsider. Using Facebook for a corporate Intranet is like using a hammer to loosen a nut. It can be done, but there’s a lot of risk involved.

So, to help you understand why Facebook shouldn’t be considered when selecting the platform for your Intranet, here are 10 more reasons why it just doesn’t stack up to the competition out there.

10) No integration with organizational LDAP – Your employees are going to want to login using a “single sign-on” with your company domain. Facebook does not provide this type of integration, meaning that your users will need to manage separate accounts. Not a huge problem (because they probably already do), but most platforms built for Intranets will include this functionality, reducing the number of logins your employees require.

9) No document sharing – Don’t be confused by the recent announcement that Groups will allow the sharing of documents. That’s a bit of a misnomer. Facebook does not currently allow for the storage/sharing of documents and the new  “document’ functionality will simply allow members of the group to create a “document” (think Notepad) and share it within the group. You won’t be able to share PowerPoint decks, MS Word docs, or Excel spreadsheets. This means that your employees will be using local drives or shared network drives to save information, which can turn into an IT nightmare. Retrieving lost documents or dealing with document versions without a system designed to handle the complexities will consume a lot of IT bandwidth.

8 ) Search isn’t designed for Intranet purposes – If you have an Intranet right now, ask your employees which functionality they wish worked better. My bet is they’ll say “search”.  Facebook’s search is designed to find people and pages, not information. Even if Facebook did add document storage and sharing, the chances of your employees actually finding anything would be slim to none.

7) Facebook is architected as an entertainment platform, not an organizational Intranet – Ever build an organizational information taxonomy for your Intranet? It can be incredibly painful, even with the right tools. Facebook doesn’t offer you the flexibility to build your Intranet navigation structure in a way that will work for your team. Instead, you’re stuck with what they give you. Also, you’d better hope they don’t change it in the future. Also, would you really want your intranet competing for resources with the likes of Farmville and Mafia Wars?

6) Changes that might not be in the interest of your organization – Facebook is in the business of making money…for Facebook. They aren’t really interested in making your organization successful and if they need to add or change functionality that is adverse to your organizations needs, there’s likely nothing you can do about it. Facebook will do what’s good for them and their future, not yours. If Facebook feels it’s more important to their pocketbook to place your competitor’s ads on your private group, they’ll do so.

5) Groups are limited to 250 members – The recent enhancement of Groups functionality has spurred additional interest in Facebook as an Intranet platform. Keep in mind, however, that in the announcement of the new Groups Mark Zuckerberg continually mentioned the 250 member limitation and that these groups are really intended to be used on a smaller scale.

4) Discussions and walls offer no pre-moderation options – Although many organizations don’t want post moderation in their intranet discussion forums, there are some that do. With Facebook, there is no pre-moderation of wall posts or discussion posts.  That means when an employee posts it, it goes live. This makes some Intranet managers uncomfortable.

3) Employees may not like the “forced” blending of work/social – Many of your employees may view Facebook as their personal social network and may not like the forced blending of their personal and professional lives. Before setting your mind on Facebook as your Intranet platform, you might want to get the input of your HR executives. They may feel that what’s out there on Facebook isn’t really the business of the organization and blending business/personal poses a potential risk.

2) No integration with your other enterprise applications – While Facebook does offer an application platform, it is definitely not geared toward integration with a corporate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool or an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. Your corporate Intranet should be the place where your employees work and where they can access their timecard apps, PTO management system, online form builder, ECM system, and ERP applications. Facebook just doesn’t offer the service-oriented architecture that is required to serve as a centralized portal.

1) Privacy, privacy, privacy. Facebook was not developed with privacy in mind. In fact, the concept of Facebook is pretty much anti-privacy. Share everything…and restrict access to those things you don’t want shared. A corporate Intranet should be exactly the opposite. Share nothing, and decided what you want shared with the outside world. Can you imagine sensitive documents being shared on Facebook and someone accidentally forgetting to set the right restrictions? For a private company, it could be a nightmare. For a public company, under FTC regulation, it could be full-blown Armageddon.

So there you have it….10 more reasons that Facebook shouldn’t be considered for a corporate Intranet. Have suggestions for the list? Feel free to add them in the comments!

Sean R. Nicholson

The launch of the popular Social Network movie coupled with Facebook’s recent enhancements to their Groups functionality has fueled the requests for my opinion as to whether Facebook is becoming a viable platform for an organizational Intranet. I’ll be writing a blog post this weekend detailing the technical/functional reasons that Facebook still isn’t a good choice, but in the meantime I wanted to share this funny video pointing out that many employees just don’t take Facebook seriously.

One of the most difficult hurdles for any Intranet to overcome is adoption and if your employees don’t take the Intranet and the content that it hosts seriously, then adoption will never follow. So, in light of that….is this how your employees feel about Facebook?

I’m not saying that Facebook will never be a suitable platform, it’s just not ready right now.

Sean R. Nicholson

Let’s face it, new employees who come to your organization right out of college are probably pretty familiar with social media. Most have been on Facebook since its inception and some have been Tweeting nearly as long. The question is whether they understand the business acumen and fundamental principles of social networking to do it correctly in the workplace.

Recently, Andrew McAffee wrote an outstanding article on two common mistakes that Millennials make at work.  The article emphasizes the fact that Generation Y has been trained to overshare their personal information, which can result in the first mistake of creating informational clutter in the workplace. The second mistake comes from a lack of an organizational hierarchy and the appropriate channels and communication practices to be used in the workplace.

For instance, posting a message on an executive’s social Intranet Wall saying “That preso was just 2 cool! I’d luv to wrk on the project if you need a hand!” may not impress the executive and may end up damaging the employees reputation. The reality is that Millennials need assistance in understanding the workplace and the difference between sharing information on Facebook and leveraging the social Intranet at their company. Any training focused on Gen-Y needs to help them understand the rules of the workplace, any policies that are in place, and the difference between social sharing and workplace sharing.

The issue of training isn’t limited to the Millennials, though. Take a look at the Baby Boomers and you may run into highly-efficient employees who are heavily reliant on phones and email and have no understanding or desire to learn about social media. “The Facebook” or “The Twitter” are just toys that kids play with and may not have any perceived value in the workplace. These social media ostriches require a different approach for training on the value of social media.  Often, the value needs to be tied to workplace productivity, return on investment for the effort, or furthering a business goal. Often, tying proposed social activities to customer service or call center activities can provide them with the frame of reference to demonstrate that social media isn’t just people talking about what they had for breakfast.

Gen-Xers aren’t immune to the issue, either. Although Gen-Xers grew up around computers, email, and the Web some have a tough time seeing social media as more than just an activity for connecting with old high school friends. Educating them on the value of collaboration and the cost savings that can be associated with it will be required to get buy-in on a new social Intranet.

The fact is, social media brings a new style of communication into the workplace and social Intranets that offer features such as status updates, wikis, threaded discussions, and microblogging also require a new level of training to help employees understand the new tools, leverage it to the fullest in their daily activities, and share only what is business appropriate.

Have a great story about a success in training your organization on the use of a social Intranet? Feel free to add a comment and let others know about the approach you took or success/failure story.

Sean R. Nicholson

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether Facebook is a suitable platform for organizations to build a corporate intranet. The fact that most employees are already on Facebook, combined with the low pricepoint (aka Free) often leads fiscally-focused executives to make statements like “Why build an Intranet, we can just use Facebook.” To see some interesting opinions on the topic, I suggest you check out this thread on the WorldWide Intranet Challenge LinkedIn group.

If you have ever thought about building your organizational intranet on Facebook, I suggest you stop and take a moment to read the following paragraph:

Facebook has no interest in being your organizational Intranet. They don’t care about your privacy or your organizational Intellectual Property. Facebook cares about attracting as many visitors to their site each day as possible so they can increase their ad buy and make more money. They love to release security-flawed features to generate lots of buzz in the press, which generates more traffic and makes them more money.

So, let’s put this issue to rest, once and for all. Facebook is not a corporate Intranet platform. Facebook does not care about your business. Facebook doesn’t care about your employees. If you want to trust your organizational information and intellectual property to a company like Facebook, then please let me know so I can stay as far away from your stock and products as possible.

Recently, Mike Watt, of Intranet Connections gave me a tour around the new Intranet Connections Version 10, which now includes an online form builder. Having built my own form builder application a few years ago for a Fortune 500 company, I have a deep appreciation for how difficult this module is to architect and implement. The beauty of Intranet Connection’s form builder is that it’s simple, easy-to-use, and doesn’t just build “plain jane” forms that send an email.

Instead, the form builder allows user to create standard form fields, pre-populate fields with database-driven SQL queries, add form validation (required fields) and….wait for it….WORKFLOW! Yes, Intranet Connections has paired their form builder with a workflow tool that allows the creator of the form to create a review or approval process for the form once it is submitted by the user.

If you look around at social Intranets today and the rich feature-sets that offer, it may seem like I’m getting excited over a relatively small piece of functionality. After all, a form builder is hardly the sexiest tool out there. But think about it….how many forms do your employees fill out each day? New employee forms, pay change forms, benefits enrollment forms, password change request forms, time off request forms…the list goes on and on. The amount of time and energy (not to mention trees) that can be saved by converting paper forms to electronic forms is staggering.

Intranet Connections v10 Offers An Easy-To-Use Form Builder Application

If your Intranet doesn’t have a form builder, you might ask your vendor “Why not?”. If you do have a form builder, are you using it to it’s maximum potential and digitizing all those paper forms?

Now…if we could just use that form builder to update the cafeteria menu <G>!

I’d be interested to hear feedback/thoughts/experiences with Intranet form builders. Let me know what you think!

Angie Cullen

When building a business case around a social Intranet, there are a few key components to consider.  Here are five suggested features that you might ask your potential vendors to demonstrate.

Forum Collaboration
By using a forum or threaded discussion  tool, you can engage your employees around specific topics and challenge them to start talking about topics that matter to them. For instance, Project Managers might discuss the project they are working on along with the status of that project, IT employees may share valuable technology updates, and HR personnel may share links to recruiting best practices.  Be sure that the tool  allows employees to create a profile and specify the topics they are interested in. This also provides a way for employees to get to know their colleagues and share information.

Social Tagging and Ranking
Although search engines are getting smarter by the minute, nothing replaces the ability for an employee to indicate whether an article or piece of content was useful to them in their job. Especially if the search engine takes that ranking into account in ordering their search results (e.g. articles they ranked higher, should be placed higher in the results). In addition, if employees are able to add their own keywords that helps influence search results, they will be able to find information that is more meaningful to them much more quickly.

Document Storage & Collaboration
With a document storage and collaboration tool, employees can find and share documents easily.  This tool will allow employees to create, open and edit documents by placing them in a centralized location that’s easy to access. Having this tool will allow multiple users to work and collaborate in real-time, based on the permissions that are set by the owner, on a document simultaneously.  A document collaboration tool can also help you cut down on storage costs. Employees will no longer need to email a status report, PowerPoint deck, or Excel spreadsheet to the entire project team (these multiple copies take up storage on the email server). Instead, they can simply email a link to the single copy stored on the Intranet and use check in/check out functionality to edit that single document.

Expertise Finder
Employees consistently rank the company directory as one of the most used functions of their Intranet. An expertise finder takes that directory one step further and allows users to identify employees that hold specific knowledge or expertise. This is paired with the ability for employees to create their social profiles and self-report their skills. Similar to tagging content, employees should also be able to tag other employees with terms that they could use in the future to find that expert again (e.g. tagging someone as “Intranet administrator”)

Knowledge Base or Wiki
Your employees have a great wealth of knowledge and given the opportunity many of them want to share it. Be sure to ask your potential Intranet vendors whether they offer a knowledge base or wiki functionality that would allow your employees to quickly, easily share nuggets of knowledge that may assist other employees. Keep in mind that it must be easy to use and be integrated with the search functionality so employees can use a single search to locate people or content.

These five key components  are just a few of the items to consider when reviewing potential software solutions for a social Intranet. Be sure to ask each of your vendors to demonstrate the functionality and consider inviting a few of your end users or members of your Intranet Governance Council to the demos to get their input, as well.

Have additional features that you think would be critical to a social Intranet? Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think is important or what has turned out to be a popular social feature for your employees.

Sean R. Nicholson

Sometimes opportunities knock quietly….and sometimes they hit us with explosive force. The trouble is, we often miss them even though they are staring us right in the face. As an example, take a look at the recent volcanic explosion in Iceland. This natural disaster has demonstrated the need for business travelers to have access to their corporate information, regardless of where they are located.

The reality is that modern business travelers are more reliant on technology than ever. Sales professionals need access to updated rate sheets and sales contacts, marketing professionals need their product collateral, legal professionals need access to up-to-date case notes, and the list goes on. Without access to the critical information required to do their jobs, traveling professionals would be at a significant disadvantage to those that are able to access their corporate information remotely.

The MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite captured an Ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano over the North Atlantic at 11:35 UTC (7:35 a.m. EDT) on April 15, 2010. Credit: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team.

In addition, the ability to keep in constant contact with employees in the home office allows travelers to make alternate arrangements for travel,meetings, and information distribution. If a sales professional is stuck in the airport in London but has access to email, their travel reservation system, and their Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system, they could reserve a train ride to France, reschedule a business meeting with their customer, and send updated product information…all from the airport.

Estimates indicate that the recent eruption caused more than 100,000 flights to be canceled. Business travelers from Okinawa to Orlando were impacted and their activities potentially disrupted. In many cases, however, employees were able to continue operating remotely due to application access provided via Virtual Private Networks (VPN), remote meeting technology like GoToMeeting, and Web-based email systems.

As a result, Intranet professionals should be looking for ways to highlight the importance of portal, security, and productivity benefits offered by Intranet applications. Demonstrating to executives how internal social media kept employees in touch and helped them conduct business during potentially disastrous times demonstrates the value of investment in an Intranet infrastructure and highlights its benefit.

I’d love to hear stories of travelers who benefited from remote technology and access to the corporate intranet. Feel free to comment and share!

Sean R. Nicholson

About a year ago, I had a conversation with a then SocialMediaphobe who tried to convince me that social media was a fad that had no future in the workplace. His argument was that Facebook was too personal and Twitter too truncated to ever offer any value to business culture. I tried to convince him that, like all emerging technologies, social media was still finding its place in the workplace, but it was slowly, almost imperceptibly changing the way we communicate. His response was to try to dissuade me by saying “it’s just a bunch of people talking about what they ate for breakfast.”

As I look back the amazing strides social media has taken in the last year, even I’m amazed. The importance of short, meaningful messages tugged at my heartstrings as major news outlets like CNN and MSNBC relied on Tweets from survivors of the tragic earthquake in Haiti to keep us informed. YouTube has become the second largest search engine in the world (arguably the largest content engine), and Facebook continues to grow at astonishing rates, becoming one of the largest photo repositories on the Web.

Yet, somehow….corporate executives continue to ignore social media like it’s going to go away. These social media ostriches often argue that Social Media is a “B to C” (business to consumer) activity, meaning that businesses can only use it to market directly to consumers. They argue that companies selling “B to B” (business to business) can’t effectively leverage social media, because it’s the wrong market and businesses don’t pay attention to social media.

Little do they understand that businesses are not faceless organisms that make decisions without human input. On the contrary, business decisions are influenced by people and made by people, making “B to B” marketing almost irrelevant in a world where social media dominates the conversation. Executives need to understand that consumers of all type rely on product advice gained from other consumers, and the value of marketing Web sites that expound on the value of their product is diminishing. Need more convincing? Take a look at the Answers section of LinkedIn and you’ll find thousands of professionals (working for businesses) asking for recommendations on ECM, CRM, Intranet, and back office software. Yes…they even ask for advice on what blogging and social media platforms to use.

A shining example of a “B to B” corporate executive leveraging social media is Carolyn Douglas, the CEO of Intranet Connections. Her passion about Intranets, collaboration, best practices, and social media are evident in her blogs and tweets. Her thought leadership in the Intranet industry influences her peers, colleagues and customers on a daily basis. She demonstrates that although her business is technically “B to B”, her social media communication is aimed at interacting with people.

Great examples of executive leadership can be found in the “B to C” markets, as well. Just look at leaders like Marc Cenedella of TheLadders.com or Bill Marriot of Marriot Hotels. Each has established a meaningful blog and/or twitter presence that educates the public on topics ranging from interviewing tips to downtown revitalization efforts. Both activities are ancillary to their business, but provide meaning to their readers. The effect of the trust they earn from their readers is often carried over to the brand the represent.

And product marketing is just the tip of the iceberg when looking for social media opportunity. The value of collaborative activities inside your organization can justify an investment relatively quickly. You see, your employees are people, and people like to share. They share their stories, experiences, and knowledge. They talk around the water cooler, at the coffee pot, and at their cubes. At work, they feel valued and important when another employee is able to use a past experience to solve a problem. They get frustrated when they discover that the knowledge in their head could have been useful to another employee in a previous experience.  It’s the age-old knowledge management problem. How do you get the knowledge out of your employees heads and into a media that can be shared and leveraged by other employees?

The answer is social media. Give your employees and platform and they will share. Sure, they’ll share personal information, too…but mixed in with stories about their weekends, cats, and World of Warcraft are valuable nuggets of corporate knowledge that can help you solve problems, produce new products, and deliver a higher level of customer and employee satisfaction. It’s up to you to find ways to filter or segment that information to uncover that which is valuable to your business, but once you do…you’ve unlocked the potential of your employees.

In summary, social media is not about people eating oatmeal. Well…actually it is. But it’s also about people solving problems and people serving customers and people buying products. Social media is about your employees and your customers. It’s about your friends and colleagues. It’s about what they want, and what they want to offer. It’s a valuable tool that will provide insight to markets, products, and ways of doing business that you probably never thought about.  It’s up to you to get involved and show leadership. Good luck!

P.S. I’d love to hear from Execs who have taken the plunge and how your efforts are proceeding. Feel free to comment or email using our contact form.

Sean R. Nicholson

While listening to Marketplace yesterday, I heard a great article on a French campaign that is aimed at sparking the entrepreneurial spirit in French workers. According to the piece by John Laurenson, the advertisements feature successful business people in clown outfits and makeup to highlight a new web site at http://www.jesuisunclown.com/ (i am a clown.com). The purpose behind the campaign is to feature successful individuals who have struck out on their own despite others telling them that their ideas were silly.In a time when the French economy needs innovators, the goal is to encourage citizens to risk their pensions and security for the life of an entrepreneur.

The article had me thinking today about employees around the world during these tough economic times and wondering whether employees are encouraged to innovate and share ideas. In the US, we are certainly seeing employees in “hunker and bunker” mode, where they are working hard to keep their jobs in the face of looming corporate cutbacks and downsizing. Unfortunately, when employees are hiding in cubeville, they are usually focusing on just doing their job and not innovating, for fear of looking like “a clown” and risking their employment. The problem with this is that our  global economy needs innovation now more than ever. We need employees to bring new product ideas to the forefront and innovate new service offerings. Managers and executives should be encouraging employees to come up with every new idea possible, regardless of how silly it might initially seem.

As Intranet Professionals, think about whether your Intranet is being used to encourage new ideas. Do you have a campaign asking employees to behave like clowns? Do you have an idea center where employees can submit their ideas and vote on those that they feel would be valuable? Are your executives open to new ideas and are they actively encouraging innovation?

Think about it…products like the slinky, magic eight ball, lava lamps, and mood rings might all probably seemed like silly ideas at the time, yet they have all been significant profit earners for their creators and are still considered by some to be among the top “It” products.

If you’re already finding unique and creative ways to inspire the “clowns” in your organization, please post a comment and share your strategies, tactics, and successes. If you haven’t started an innovation program yet, now might be a great time to start a clown college inside your organization. Your clowns, might just be the key to growing your business and our economy.

Sean R. Nicholson

In the first article in this series on rethinking the old model of Intranet portals, I covered the basics of why the old model of selling Intranet portal software doesn’t really work in the new world of Enterprise 2.0. The old model provided (comparatively) limited functionality at huge software price tags and infrastructure needs, primarily because the competition in the marketplace only existed with large software vendors.

The recent explosion of social media platforms, coupled with the financial meltdown driving a need for operational improvement, has left purchasers exploring low-cost open source options. This behavior is driving commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors to rethink their licensing models. In addition, purchasers of Intranet software have started to expect expanded social media functionality and a variety of options for licensing/hosting their Intranet portals. In this article, we’ll focus on the new platforms available for Intranet portals as well as some of the options available to organizations as a result of this shift.

Quick Review – Why the old model doesn’t work

1. Lengthy Return On Investment – With multi-millon dollar investments, organizations rarely have a positive business case that shows a realistic ROI in less that 5 years. This means that it usually takes an organizational event like a merger, acquisition, spinoff, or change in leadership to get the funding approved.
2. Difficult To Track Process Improvement Impacts – After making the investment, organizations like HR or Corporate Communications often take over the operation of the Intranet with their own departmental initiatives taking priority. Operational organizations like Sales and Customer Support are often too busy and too entrenched in their old processes to take time to reinvent their operations to leverage the features offered by the new portal. As a result, the inability to move the business forward relegates the portal to a (very expensive) one-way communication vehicle and nothing more.
3. Added Features Come With Added Costs – Nothing ticks me off more than seeing cool new functionality from an Intranet portal vendor that is a “bolt-on” to the core software. What “bolt-on” usually means is that it’s not going to be core functionality any time soon and that it comes with an extra price tag, not to mention additional, ongoing annual maintenance costs.
4. Expensive Infrastructure Requirements – In the old model, one enterprise-scale Intranet portal for 50,000 employees required more than $75,ooo in Sun hardware costs (web servers, app servers, database servers, etc…). Even running on WinTel with VMWare, you were still looking at $30K+ in hardware. In either situation, you also require space in the data center, cost of power in the data center, Server Administrators to maintain and monitor, and the process/hardware costs of backup and restore.

While there are other costs involved, the old model of selling/implementing Intranet portals can drive a pretty hefty investment. On top of that, once the investment is made, executives are reticent to the change platforms or enhance them, because the initial investment is so great.  The key to overcoming that hesitation is to put together a strong business case with a quick ROI, usually based on the fact that the organization can either reduce operational expenses or costly annual software maintenance agreement (SMA) fees.

New Platforms For Intranet Hosting

The beauty of the shift away from the traditional portal model means that vendors have started to get creative in the way they offer their Intranet solutions. For instance, no longer is the traditional download/install/update/upgrade model the only game in town. With SaaS, cloud computing, and other options coming more into the spotlight and social media companies wanting to get into the game, there are a whole host (no pun intended) of options out there for organizations looking to build or reinvent their Intranet.

Software As A Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service bundles software licenses with a hosted infrastructure

If you haven’t heard the term “SaaS” being thrown around the water cooler, get ready…it’s on its way. I would definitely consider SaaS to be one of the hot buzzwords in corporate America in 2009 and it doesn’t look to slow down for 2010. As organizations look for ways to cut costs, Software as a Service has offered an attractive way to reduce annual software maintenance costs and recover from reductions in headcount necessitated by the economy.

Essentially, SaaS is a model where a software vendor provides all the hardware, software licenses, and infrastructure (bandwidth, backups, restores, upgrades, etc…) necessary and provides the customer with access to that environment via the Web. Instead of having to foot costly up-front capital bills for hardware and software, companies can opt for smaller monthly expense bills that are easier to digest and plan for. In addition, since the vendor is usually responsible for upgrades, new feature functionality is often added with no additional expense to the customer. Another benefit is that the ROI on a portal can be realized quickly due to the fact that there isn’t such a large outlay as in the traditional licensing model.

SaaS isn’t all peaches and cream, though. There are still concerns about placing sensitive organizational data in the hands of third-party vendors.  IT leaders are still skeptical, having seen their colleagues go through massive loss of credit card numbers, mishandling of customer information, and security breaches. Companies outside the US are also hesitant to jump on the SaaS bandwagon when data would be stored in US-based data centers. The broad reaches of the US Patriot Act makes them a bit hesitant to subject their customer or competitive information to potential seizure by US agencies. One other downside of SaaS is the fact that over the long term life of the agreement, an organization might actually pay more for a SaaS portal than they would have under the traditional model. Plummeting prices around enterprise portal software, however, are reducing that risk.

Even with these potential downsides, more and more software vendors are putting together SaaS packages to offer to their customers. Services like Ning.com and WebX’s Intranets.com are offering their services on a SaaS basis. Even companies like SalesForce.com (traditionally a CRM application vendor) is adding a Social Media component to their offering (aptly named “Chatter”) that will extend their services to more intranet-like functionality.

Hosting In The Cloud

Cloud Computing is opening up a new range of custom services for Intranet portals

Yes…you’re reading this right. I am splitting out SaaS and Cloud hosting. Too many folks are using the terms “SaaS” and “cloud computing” interchangeably and the fact is that they aren’t necessarily the same thing. SaaS solutions are one flavor of cloud computing, but SaaS agreements relegate all aspects of control over the environment and the software to the vendor. There are alternative cloud hosting agreements that allow the organization varying levels of control over installation, maintenance, upgrades, and administration. These custom agreements give the company the benefits of outsourced hosting with the required level of control that meets their needs.

Managed Services Agreements

Similar to SaaS in the fact that the vendor provides all the hardware, managed services agreements usually combine the headache-free environmental benefits with the traditional purchasing of perpetual licenses. Where the old model requires the organization to purchase software licenses and hardware, the managed services option allows companies to buy the licenses and pay a monthly, quarterly, or annual fee to the software vendor to provide servers and administration in their data center. The benefit of this model is that companies can pay the capital outlay on the software and expense the periodic costs of hosting. Managed services agreements often provide for application administration, which outsources the expertise of the application to the vendor. No longer do companies have to hire expensive knowledge experts to configure and maintain their portal application. Instead, they can go right to the source and have expertise from the vendor perform the necessary tasks.

On-Premise Leasing

On premise leasing is the flip-flop version of Managed Services Agreements. In these situations, the company usually has the hardware and resources in-house to host and administer the software, but they don’t want to lay out the large capital outlay for the portal software. Instead, they choose to lease the software licenses and host them on their servers. If/when the company chooses to discontinue use of the software, they simply terminate the relationship (per the terms of the agreement) and uninstall the software.

Appliance-Based Intranets

Some vendors are bundling hardware with software to offer an Intranet applicance

About 10 years ago, I remember reading articles like this one, touting how Intranet appliances were going to rescue us from poor productivity and change the face of enterprise applications as we know it. Vendors were looking for ways to capitalize on plug-and-play Intranets, but their primary shortcoming was the lack of a user-friendly interface that was both customizable and able to integrate with other applications.

Appliances, however, are making a comeback since the cost of hardware has dropped significantly and the bundling of high-quality Intranet software makes the user experience much more appealing. Companies such as SocialText and Bitrix are working on ways to deliver their Intranet or Social Media functionality to the enterprise in an appliance platform. These hardware appliances allow organizations to rack-and-stack the hardware, configure the software, and be up in running in days.

More To Come On Software Licensing

As more and more platform options are offered to the public, companies are also revamping their licensing options. In the next article in this series, we’ll take a look at shifts in traditional per-user and per-processor licensing, as well as new payment options such as monthly payments, ad-supported options, and on-premise leasing.

As always, feedback and comments are appreciated.