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

There are a lot of great Intranet-focused resources on the Web, but they are scattered across a wide variety of sites. In an effort to bring those resources together in a common place, Angie Cullen and I have put together the beginning of an Intranet Wiki with links to a broad range of resources.

This tool is in its infancy, and we’d love to have your contributions and input to make it one of the best Intranet tools on the Web. Know of a good resource? Share it with us! Know of an upcoming event or a great Intranet tweeter? We want to add it!

Let us know what you think about the tool and how we can make it a useful tool for Intranet professionals! The more collaboration we get around this tool, the better it will be come. Feel free to spread the word about this great new tool so we can get as much input as possible!

We have added an “IntraWiki” link to our to navigation for easy access from any page on the site.

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts/comments.

–Sean

Sean R. Nicholson

It never ceases to amaze me how few people trust their organizational intranets. A tool that was designed specifically for the purpose of helping employees do their job better and faster is often the joke of the water cooler. Yet organizations knowingly ignore the fact that employees don’t use or trust the information stored on their intranet.

Periodically, I have the great opportunity to sit in front of a group of employees and ask them about their intranet experiences. Often, it’s in anticipation of an intranet revamp, so the need for a “do-over” or an evolution has already been defined at some level. While the individual users and comments might be different, they usually go start with something like this:

Me: Who here uses the Intranet fairly consistently?  (half the hands in the room go up).

Me: For those of you whose hands aren’t up, why don’t you use it?

Response #1: The content stinks.

Response #2: I can never find what I’m looking for.

Response #3: Yeah, and when you do find something that looks right, it’s two years old.

Response #4: The last time I searched the intranet for the latest information on new Java libraries, the first five search results were the hours and

specials at the local coffee shop.

Me: For those of you with your hands up, (you can put them down now) tell me how you choose to use the intranet?

Response #1: I use the employee directory. It’s right most of the time because it’s tied to our active directory and employees are added/removed as they join or leave the company.

Response #2: I use it to see what’s being served in the cafeteria. They do a good job of updating the menu each morning.

Response #3: I used it to download the forms to change my 401(k). I did have to choose between last year’s forms and this year’s forms, but I navigated directly to the HR landing page, and didn’t use the search tool.

…and the conversation goes on for another hour. Each employee sharing their stories of frustration or limited successes with the intranet platform. One failure feeds another employee’s stories and the negative sentiment in the room grows. Frustrations often include multiple logins, confusing navigation, multiple windows, and ugly design but the vast majority of their frustrations are around the relevancy of content, outdated information, and poor search results.

Now, imagine for a moment that, instead of the corporate intranet, these comments and stories were being said about another employee. If an employee had a history of providing inaccurate information, was behind the times and slow in their responses, and didn’t collaborate well with other employees it’s highly likely that they wouldn’t survive their next performance review. Yet organizations continue to ignore the fact that a tool that is key to their business success is unable to provide employees what they need. In fact, many companies invest more money in licensing fees and servers for their Intranet than any single employee in their company. Yet, the investment in keeping the content fresh and relevant is minimal. When you present your Intranet in this light, it seems like a logical deduction that an annual review of the performance of your Intranet is worthwhile.

The conversation continues to get more interesting as the focus shifts toward what the employees would like from their Intranet:

Me: First, are you interested in having a functional Intranet? If so, why?

Response #1: Definitely! It would make my job a lot easier if I could find updates to our products and pricing easily.

Response #2: Not really, we purchased a different tool for our group to store information because the Intranet is is bad.

Response #3: I would use the Intranet if I knew the search worked. Right now, it’s just too hard to navigate around a hope that I find what I’m looking for.

Response #4: I think a good Intranet would really help the company do business. It just needs to be a lot easier to use. No one asks the employees how they want it to work, they just give us a tool and say “Figure it out”.

Response #5: They should probably just start over and build something like Facebook. I’m already friends with most of my co-workers, anyway, so it would be easier if we could just make a private place on Facebook where we could share company information.

From these responses, it clear that the desire for an intranet exists in some format. Even responses #2 and #5 indicate that there is a need for a tool, they just opted to use something else or want a different tool since the organizational intranet wasn’t meeting their needs.

Steps To Develop Organizational Trust In Your Intranets

1) Ask Your Employees For Input

Most employees that I talk to feel like they have no ownership or input to the Intranet. They view it as a tool that is given to them by the organization and its structure and content are set in stone. They are, however, interested in making it a better tool and have plenty of input on how to improve it. Some of the input is good, some of it is wishful thinking, and some of it is so focused on their specific job that it may not be useful to others. Little changes to navigation and content, based on their feedback, does increase positive sentiment and gives employees a sense that they had an impact on organizational change.

2) Give Employees The Chance To Shape Content

Because content woes are top of the list when it comes to frustration with their intranet, many employees would welcome the opportunity to contribute content or, at the minimum, provide feedback on the value of the content. Although most aren’t interested in writing blogs, they would like to be able to suggest content or changes to ensure that information is accurate. To accommodate this, feedback forms, commenting systems, and content rating tools can help employees flag or suggest content. By providing these tool to employees, organizations remove the excuse that “content isn’t useful” and put the onus on the employee to shape the quality of the content.

3) Conduct Scheduled Content Audits

Empowering your employees to help shape the quality of the content doesn’t mean that employees responsible for maintaining the Intranet can sit back and relax. Consistent auditing of search logs to find failed searches (those with zero results returned) can help determine a need for creating or re-purposing content. In addition, face-to-face conversations with your employees to ask what they would find valuable can result in a gold mine of  content requests. Obviously, the need to evaluate future functionality is a key responsibility, ensuring that employees are armed with tools and features that will help them in their daily activities.

4) Optimize Your Pages To Work With Your Search Engine

Although it’s tempting to blame the technology behind poor or failed search results, it’s usually not the intranet search engine that’s causing failed searches. Instead, it’s likely poor search optimization or old content that results in failed searches and employee frustration. Taking some time to understand the fundamentals of search engine optimization and tuning your pages to meet the search patterns of your employees can make a huge difference, without having to rip out and replace your search engine.

Just like any employee in your organization, neglect of your Intranet will result in poor performance and dissatisfaction. If you’re really interested in improving your business processes, doing more with less, and helping your employees do their job try investing a little more time and energy into ensuring that your content is good and is able to be found.

EAVB_ZUCRRVMRCL

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

Continuing with my posts on great Twitter resources, this is a followup to my 99 Great Internal Comms Resources,  99 Great Intranet Resources and 99 Great ECM Resources posts. Below is a link to my list of 99+ great SharePoint Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who tweet about SharePoint as an Intranet platform, ECM solution, and a collaboration tool…these are your folks! Pay careful attention and you may see folks who are also providing links to some valuable SharePoint alternatives, as well.

Sean’s list of 99+ Great SharePoint resources on Twitter

Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean R. Nicholson

2009 has been a great year full of exciting opportunities, great projects, engaging conversations, and healthy dialog about the topics of Intranets, Enterprise Content Management, and Enterprise 2.0. As I reflect on the events that have occurred over the last year, I’m amazed at how much has transpired and how many new people I have had the honor of connecting with.

Here are some of the highlights, that I thought I would share. In 2009, I am please to have:

• Started the IntranetExperience blog as an effort to capture some of my Intranet design and implementation experiences and share them with others.
• Created a Twitter account, which drove me to read hundreds (maybe thousands) of articles posted by fellow Tweeps.
• Compiled a following list of more than 600 invaluable resources who tweet on Intranets, Enterprise Content Management, Social Media, and Enterprise 2.0.
• Earned the privilege of being followed by more than 700 folks on Twitter who think I might have something valuable to say everyone once in a while.
• Connected online with some amazing Intranet resources including:
  • Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media;
  • Carolyn Douglas and Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections;
  • James Robertson and Alex Manchester of Step Two Designs
  • Peter Richards, who writes the Wheat and Chaff blog
  • Jane McConnell of NetJMC
  • Christy Season, who blogs at ChristyWeb.com
  • Wedge, who blogs at kilobox.net
• Engaged in thought-provoking dialogs on enterprise content management with ECM gurus like:
  • Cheryl McKinnon of Nuxeo
  • Martin Sumner-Smith of OpenText
  • Carl Frappaolo and John Mancini of AIIM
  • Sascha Ohler and Mike Wessel of Perceptive Software
• Had incredible face-to-face conversations with other Intranet and ECM professionals including folks like:
  • Karl Geisler
  • Jeff Allen
  • Michele Sperle
  • Dan Dillon
  • Ken Berlack
  • Dan Kneeshaw
  • Angela Cullen
• Developed 20 different subject matter-oriented lists on Twitter of outstanding experts in their respective areas.
• Helped educate others that social media isn’t just people blogging about their families and tweeting about what they ate for breakfast. I successfully convince others that tweeting is a good thing, and some of them have even stuck with it.
• Worked with great folks like Patty Dugan, Matt Feeny, Jill Ducey, Paul Arhnold, and Jeremy McNieve to develop an initial Social Media strategy around Twitter.

All of this, on top of enjoying a great day job, spending quality time with my family, and carving out a bit of time for myself.

Not too shabby, if I don’t say so myself.

What’s even better is I have even higher hopes to build on the foundation of 2009 and expand these activities, conversations, and opportunities in 2010!

A special thanks to everyone I have listed here for their thoughts, comments, and engagement. And to anyone that I might have left off, this post is likely a work in progress and a gentle reminder of any accomplishment that should be added to the list is much appreciated.

Happy New Year to everyone and my 2010 be your best year yet!

–Sean

Sean R. Nicholson

Last week was a great week for online discussions relating to Intranets. On Monday, Alex Manchester of Step Two Designs posted an article to his blog asking whether the term Intranet is dead. His thoughts were sparked by a recent presentation by Jane McConnell of NetJMC and the conversation that ensued was a healthy dialog on the future of Intranets, their relevance in a world of social media, and whether the term “intranet” was really the best way to describe an interactive workplace. The conversation continued throughout the week and I’d encourage anyone who works with Intranets to check out the threaded discussion and add their $.02.

Tuesday continued the interesting online conversations as Jarrod Gingras and Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch made his predictions for technology in 2010. One of particular interest to me was his prediction #1 that :

1) Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways
ECM as a marketing and technical concept has great validity. But the idea of having a single overarching platform to manage all sources of content management only works well in those enterprises that follow a unified and services-oriented architectural approach to IT.

I agree with Jarrod and my interpretation of this prediction is that organizations that aren’t able to settle on a single vendor for all of their information systems or aren’t able to invest in a comprehensive services-oriented architecture just won’t be concerned with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) because they won’t be able to address every departmental business process problems with a single ECM tool.

To expand on Jarrod’s prediction, I’m thinking that as more and more vendors build document management functionality into their applications, organizations will be less concerned with where it is stored, as long as it is stored properly, is accessible to the end-users that need it, and can be discovered and produced in time of legal necessity. Instead of costly redevelopment of business processes to restructure where content is stored, organizations will invest in search technology that allows content to be stored in native applications and use search tools like Microsoft Enterprise Search, Autonomy, and Google appliances to ferret out information.

In other words, federated search will become crucial to organizations that choose not to implement a structured ECM architecture.

The results of this kind of shift are as follows:

1. Content and documents  will reside in their native application, allowing the information to have more context than if it were stored in a centralized ECM system.
2. Those ECM vendors who wish to provide value to the enterprise must figure out how to store the content centrally, yet serve it back to end users in a context that is meaningful to their end users.
3. ECM vendors who provide true, enterprise-scale software MUST offer a full services-oriented architecture that will allow business applications to easily access the content and surface documents in the context of the business application.

S0…this brings me to my question of the week. Is Enterprise Content Management going the way of the Intranet and becoming an outdated notion? Will better federated search technologies negate the need for a central repository? Are organizations better off investing in the functional elements of ECM like document management, records management, and business process management instead of buying the whole enchilada?

I’m curious to see what others think…looking forward to thoughts/comments.

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.