Archive for February, 2009

What Ultra Collaborative Intranet Platform is best for Total Attorneys?

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009



We are evaluating which platform to build the Total Attorneys ultra-collaborative intranet on.

We know that an internal community mashup /collaboration environment is needed to support our collaboration needs as we continue to grow as an organization.

Our company currently is 170 super talented people, from software development, sales, customer support, accounting, HR, IT, marketing, call center, legal process outsourcing to yours truly.

Here are some of the features we feel we need. We are willing to write some custom code to accomplish our needs. However, we do not want to build the platform from scratch. We want the ability to setup a platform and enable everyone to build on it.

Personalized homepage for each employee. (Facebook like)

• Allow employees to express themselves and get to know each other
• Mashup of all feeds, blog, twitter, videos, content created/edited on intranet

RSS Aggregator

• Internal blogs and videos – show most viewed, most commented (this month, this year, today, etc.) Comments obviously only to be seen from within as these are internal only blogs and videos.
• External blogs and videos – show most viewed internally, most commented internally, (this month, this year, today, etc.) Keep comments contained only within our intranet.
• Internal tagging system (tag videos, blog posts)

Ability to blast messages to entire company (Yammer like)

• Reduce all company blast emails

Ability to create Polls/Surveys and track results (Survey Monkey like)

• Query our people, pick their brains.
• Take votes, enable democracy.

Document Repository for HR/Corporate

• Employee Manual, HR, 401k Info, Benefits, etc.

Internal Email/Messaging Capabilities

• Communication amongst teams
• Discussion boards
• Internal classifieds (looking to sale your car?, need nanny?)

Collaborative Workspace

• Google Docs/Spreadsheet like
• BaseCamp & Writeboard like

Allow Users to Form their own Groups/Communities (Social)

• Think Tanks
• Knitting Clubs
• Green Team

Department Resources

• Department wikis and blogs
• Document sharing

Company Updates

• New TA products
• Events and outings calendar

So far we have looked at MindTouch, SocialText, Confluence, Intranet Dashboard, Hyper Office, InstaIntranet and eKtron. At this point in our evaluation I’m told that SocialText appears to be the strongest candidate.

What is the best platform for us to build our intranet on and why?