That said, the requirements are vastly different in this part of a company. It's one thing to offer companies lightweight "Microsoft Office" and quite another to wrap all of this up into a single environment (and if Google Intranet is the North star, we're all in trouble).

Beyond the full collaborative feature-set required, most companies need you to marry with a lot of their current systems and home-grown code. And then there's the deep security, permission, and performance requirements. Not to mention an entire department that will want the code on premises.

I'll be interested to see how Google can pull all those things together with the Jotspot wiki. Especially for larger companies.

If RW/W readers aren't familiar with Jive's work, particularly Clearspace X, I encourage everyone to have a look. We have been using Clearspace X for only a few months now and are already seeing tremendous benefits for our internal and external communities. The application offers a level of simplicity that is most commonly seen in the consumer space while also meeting the must-have requirements for the business community.

The biggest single question mark for these types of applications seems to be whether or not a simple, web-based tool for content creation and management can break into a heavily-regulated, corporate environment such as a bank or insurance firm. Quite rightly, these organizations come with extremely inflexible and serious requirements for corporate records management, content retention, risk management, auditing and corporate good governance.

Creating a fun, light and easy-to-use web tool for content creation and collaboration is one thing. Making it fit into this inescapable corporate reality is another.

This is helpful information, but your blindspot is showing. How could you write this: "So on the one hand you had too much complexity (Vignette et al), but on the other too much simplicity (blogs, wikis)" -- as though SharePoint doesn't exist? JotSpot/Google will be a tough challenger but SharePoint owns this intermediate space today. Are you completely unaware of what is actually going on in most business environments?

This omission aside, Read/WriteWeb is generally an excellent tech blog.

And fyi I am very familiar with the business web environment, having worked as a web manager for a number of years (managing intranets and internet sites for corporates).

Do you see the et al after Vignette? That means and others. You know, like SharePoint. Just thought you would like to know.

It amazes me how great Google apps are.

Adam

Joe McKendrick, on ZDNet discusses the adoption of Facebook as he intranet by a corporate.

look up serena software, they use fb as a quasi-intranet, ad they pioneered the idea of "Facebook Fridays"

Most of my internal clients think that making the font at least 72pt means that people will read it. When in fact its rather difficult to read something at that size.

While there are some clients who do get it, most don't. You will need a specialist to design the communication of information to get the best results. Even then I've have come across horrendous designs by designers.

However, I can see it might be useful in an enclosed team environment as a dumbed down wiki. But whats wrong with using folders with security settings, you can browse images and documents using your explorer window? Im sure they can make this more interactive over time. Oh wait, pretty sure OS X Leopard does this!

People just don't know how to use what they have!