Google Instant Intranet
Google has an upcoming Personalized Start Page for Enterprise, according to some sleuthing done by Garrett Rogers and Scott Smith at Google Blogoscoped. Here's an example Dell start page and the official help page.
The Personalized Start Page will be one of the options available in the beta Apps For Your Domain service. Currently email, IM, calendar and website creator is included in the package. In the Google Blogoscoped forum, there's further speculation about Writely integration and the ability to add Adsense to it.
I think Google sees Personalized Start Page for Enterprise as a kind of 'instant Intranet' option for small-medium businesses. While the example above is from Dell, it's unlikely a big corporation would ditch their (often hugely expensive) custom-made Intranet. It could also be used as a customer-facing website, which the Dell example seems to be. But I don't think that's all that appealing from a branding point of view.
You'll note that the Dell page includes some special Dell gadgets (see image below). This is where it starts to get interesting, as we morph into a world of componentized web apps. That kind of functionality would be very useful on a company Intranet.
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On the surface, it sounds great. An 'instant intranet'? This concept caught my attention. However, it just doesn't go much further than the old Yahoo Portal services that Yahoo used to offer to large enterprises, such as Havas, back in 2001. I had the pleasure, or rather displeasure, of using the Yahoo Intranet Portal for Havas.
What use is an intranet if your organisation does not have complete control over it?
Great post!!!
hi matthew,
I can understand that you didn't like YAHOO's offering in 2001. Well, now, it's 2006 and the world knows what works better, don't we ?
If I'm a small shop -- less than 50 people, I might not have an IT savvy person in my organization who's also web savvy. Instead of spending in excess of 50,000 dollars for an intranet on an employee for this job, it might make sense of email, calendering is included in the plan!
If properly supported, this plan can make sense for a majority of small businesses. Medium business will be better served by having more control, I think.
BR,
~A
I bought a new Dell machine about 2 months ago and it came with the default home page set to the Dell start page.
Anjan, i guess it depends on what you really need an intranet for. For me, an intranet is a secure, enclosed environment for employees to safely share and communicate ideas without fear of them escaping to the www. Unless i'm missing something, the Google Intranet is nothing more than a personalised, brandable portal page that can be edited by a few different users. I'm not sure 'intranet' is the correct term for this solution.
Matthew, I think this could be used as an intranet for a small-medium business -- think of it as a dashboard type intranet homepage. It's a bit of a stretch right now, but especially as gadgets become more common place - why not enable company employees to create their 'own' Intranet personalized homepage. In fact that's pretty much what a modern intranet homepage is nowadays - a mix of internal secure content, plus news and other content which may come from the Web.