Intranet information architecture: don’t reinvent the wheel
By Toby Ward The ultimate goal of the intranet manager, architect is to create an ‘intuitive’ ... [read more]
It’s no surprise that the big, traditional technology behemoths of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle dominate the intranet vendor landscape. In fact, in recent years, the big three have gobbled-up or pushed-out smaller contenders (e.g. IBM buys Filenet; Oracle buys nearly everyone else) or have forced many others to merge (e.g. OpenText buys Vignette; Autonomy buys Interwoven) or shut them out of the business all together.
Social media is all the rage, and most organizations now use social software in some form on their intranet (present on 87% of organization intranets, according to the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study). As the study reveals, most organizations that have social media tools, have not yet deployed them enterprise wide (making intranet 2.0 available to all employees), a key ingredient for a social intranet; fewer than 10% of organizations have a truly social intranet that incorporates social media at most levels and encourages the use of these tools by all employees.
Social software contenders are challenging the big three’s dominance of the intranet technology platform market with solutions that are not traditional portal or CMS solutions, but are social media platforms. No longer are wikis and blogs relegated to some far flung corner of the intranet, now they are the intranet.
Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” for social software vendors also reveals the dominance of the big guys, namely Microsoft and IBM. While Gartner’s analysis isn’t a pure look at strictly social solutions, Microsoft and OpenText don’t have pure social solutions, it does highlight some (but not all) of the emerging pure plays.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software vendors, 2010
Here’s a quick look at five key social intranet platform vendors to watch in 2011.
ThoughtFarmer is one of the more established social intranet vendors. It has evolved from a wiki platform into a more encompassed social intranet offering. Based on the wiki, ThoughtFarmer “combines traditional intranet features — things like news, structured content, search and an employee directory — with social software features, like blogs, feeds, wikis and social networks.”
While ThoughtFarmer is one of the smaller, privately-owned competitors, it is well-established and has a solid customer base.
Key features:
Blogs
Wikis
Calendars
Discussion forums
People directory / profiles
Groups
Feeds
Web content management
Document management
Key features:
Wikis
Web content management
Enterprise dashboards
Search
Community scoring (rating)
Social user profiles
Key features:
Social networking
Content management
Document storage
Blogs
Forums
Instant messaging
Commenting, sharing ,tagging , rating, polling
Key features:
Wikis
Shared online workspaces
Document management
Project management
Network dashboard
Conference calling (initiate a conference phone call with your connections)
Key features:
Discussion forums
Collaborative documents
Document management
Blogs
Polls
Videos
Microblogging
Community voting and commenting
Synchronizing with MS Office and SharePoint
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