As the shift in media continues to move at an incredible pace we are beginning to see it reach out and touch more and more aspects of our lives, it notably affects the way we socialize, but most recently we have seen it transforming the way that businesses communicate and collaborate internally especially within their intranets.  Typical intranets tend to become deserted desert islands with content overload, little staff use, and a lack of modern features.  Slowly unused intranets used for housing documents have to evolve into systems that more closely resemble internal communities where employees can share and find information; collaborate across global teams on critical projects, and where the community removes bottlenecks in the hunt for help or direction by offering solutions in real time.

We’ve seen an increase in companies looking to update or completely replace their aging and ineffective intranet environments, rebuilding them to include modern day interactive capabilities and search functions all in the hopes of increasing productivity, decreasing costs, and creating a more engaged workforce.
One important way of transforming an intranet into a functioning internal community is the inclusion of web 2.0 features and effects that naturally lend themselves to connecting employees, reducing costs, and increasing collaboration. In fact you will find that your younger workforce made up of GenX and GenY prefer to leverage collaborative community orientated systems over the traditional ones like email and flat intranets that have dominated corporate America for the past 10 years.
There are multiple use cases for creating an internal community intranet including:

• Corporate Communications: Enabling them from all directions, including (top down) from the executives to employees, (bottom up) employee feedback to executives, and (laterally) among employees.
• Collaboration: Helping people find the materials they need, and creating a space where they can collaborate anywhere anytime in order to increase innovation and productivity.
• Sales Enablement: Providing a platform that incorporates training, real time information, sales materials, and help from experts to shorten sales cycles and improve win rates.
• Digitize Processes: Recognize cost and time savings by moving various processes to self serve models in the intranet.