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Intranets are supposed to be a source of information that employees can use to be more effective in their jobs. They're supposed to be but the fact is, intranets tend to be unloved and ignored. Socialcast has pulled together an infographic that demonstrates how intranets are failing to live up to their promise in most environments.

The small business market is seeing a new crop of customer relationship management and intranet applications designed to provide a basic set of features without overwhelming the user. GlassCubes is an example of the type of companies entering this space, providing tools that the average sales person can begin using with little or no training.

GlassCubes is a London-based company that launched last Fall. They now have about 250 customers. A good number of their users are companies that migrated from British Telecom Workspace, which has discontinued its contact management and collaboration product. GlassCubes has teamed up with the telecom provider to help users make the switch.

We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google's pitches into the corporate world.

But it's always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.

Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today, Development Seed, the open source shop behind DrupalCon in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of Open Atrium.

Open Atrium is a free and open source intranet built as a Drupal distribution, with some impressive functionality available out of the box. Not only is this a solid piece of software to begin with, but its makers are evangelizing what they think could be a transformative paradigm for extending Drupal's capabilities.

MindTouch, the collaborative software that began as a fork of MediaWiki, has just launched the first of three new turnkey collaborative networks for the enterprise that go far beyond the software's beginnings as a wiki.

With the next two scheduled to be made public in the next six months, this first new release is of the MindTouch Collaborative Intranet.

This intranet is focused on taking all the information from your legacy applications and integrating them in to the much more accessible interface that MindTouch has inherited from its other open source and enterprise implementations. The goal is to take the resources you need and break down the silos that separate them to create a fabric of information that is easy to comb through and work with.

The 3.5 release of ThoughtFarmer, the self-titled "social intranet software," adds the kind of features that fully embody their strategy: incremental changes to encourage collaboration.

ThoughtFarmer has quietly been working to build an intranet that really meets the needs of enterprise, especially designers of all stripes. True to its name, the software combines all the hallmarks of an old school intranet with a comprehensive set of social features, including blogs, wikis, activity streams, and status updates (among others).

Earlier this month, we opened up and shared with readers the different ways we're pitched by companies wanting coverage. We mentioned our favorite way (hint: RSS) and have been enjoying the feeds that have been sent in since. We also noted the arrival of the twitpitch - the new trend of pitching via Twitter. Meanwhile, another company had a completely different idea: pitch via mail. Yes, postal mail.