Hi Shiv, There actually is a big retail company over here in Switzerland that uses outlook as their intranet client. I once did a case study on them in regard to their intranet governance modell and it was quite interesting to see how they provide “all the information” employees need in outlook (including sharepoint workspaces etc.)

How true and how sad these assumptions are. Add in the recent post from James Robertson on 25 incorrect assumptions about intranets acting as a productivity tool and you could feel quite depressed. The fundamental problem has nothing to do with intranets and a huge amount to do with information management. Far too many organisations have no concept about the importance of information to their operations. Information management is seen as a synonym for information systems, and it is something very different and much more potent.

Much of my work is now in helping organisations develop intranet strategies, and from that encourage their organisation to fit the intranet strategy into a wider information strategy. Intranets have to be decision support platforms and all the content should be aligned along making effective decisions. Even news has a role as it should help the employee to make the decision to stay! Start linking decisions into risk amelioration and you will find the risk/compliance manager camping out in your office. Businesses are going to be so risk averse that an intranet that can play a significant role in reducing risk will have a very significant impact..

An intranet is not a technology, it is a structured collection of the very best quality information that the organisation has developed or purchased. That of course rasies the issue of what the quality standards for information are in an organisation. I bet they exist for health and safety but not for information.

Far too much is being made of the next generation intranets being collaboration platforms. For me the next-generation intranets will be work-flow based. Click on the link to the stage in the workflow you have reached (preparing a tender, filing an appeal, doing a lessons-learned review) and just the information you need at that stage of the process will appear, complemented by enbedded search that presents highly effective pre-planned search strategies delivered though a click on a link and not through having to enter keywords. Part of that process will be collaboration, but just turning an intranet into a forum of some form is not going to be of any lasting value.

Not sure that these comments are quite aligned with your original post but hopefully they may spark some more intelligent contributions.

SharePoint and InfoPath are the tools we use to ensure “Intranets are not just intranets anymore”. We have made excellent progress in redefining the intranet in multiple organization doing exactly what you suggest : Extending the intranet as a suite of critical web based business applications that drives employee productivity and collaboration.

BM

However it does indeed raise the question of Outlook’s dominance in large enterprises. I think in smaller business, or new businesses, where cloud based applications or open source get a foot in the door earlier (e.g. Gmail, or Thunderbird & Lightning, etc) its actually easier to think of ‘old’ browser based intranet. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft do a much better job of integrating the next version of Sharepoint with the Exchange / Outlook platform.