Intranet 2.0 - thinking mashups, feeds, and consumability

The entrepreneurial spirit is demonstrated strongly on the Internet by ambitious web-geeks, excited to develop their ideas into new ‘web 2.0’ applications and ‘mash-ups’ of data and services on the web. Individuals & small teams have rapidly implemented new cutting-edge sites like zillow, del.icio.us, friendfeed, facebook, etc. The ‘web 2.0’ Internet today is becoming ever more useful as social networks, collaboration, and data mashups help make information better and easier to access. So, what about the INTRANET?

It seems that organizations are buzzing about ‘web 2.0’. Adoption is slow due to complex technical (and political) environments, and the lack of exposed services/feeds in legacy apps. Most internal apps are designed around the immediate business requirements... meaning traditional concepts like security and databases are the focus of design. In the Internet ‘web 2.0’ world, things like consumability and open APIs are a new additional design focus. After getting through the policy discussion & dodging the 'yesbutters' of web2.0... there are some new tools that are going to help the workplace play catch-up:

Web 2.0 collaboration platforms like Sharepoint 2007 –

There’s a lot to say about the new Sharepoint. There’s nothing else really like it, since it provides so many ‘web 2.0’ish features in one tidy package (with blogs, wikis, discussions, surveys, sharing, content management, and more). Sure, you could buy separate ‘best of breed’ individual packages for each of these components… but then you'd have to support & implement each product individually. Sharepoint is good enough & lets you easily deliver custom sites that can produce & consume RSS and XML(via XSL).

Mashup tools –

I fell in love with Yahoo! Pipes at first site. On the Internet, you could potentially mashup ANYTHING using this tool (sometimes with the help of a feed scraper like Feed43). There are some promising comparable tools now coming available for organizations to mashup all those internal feeds. One that looks great is IBM’s Damia (very similar to Pipes). Another is Kapow… but Damia looks more advanced. With tools like these, you could start mashing up internal feeds on Sharepoint sites to avoid all those confusing situations where users need to visit multiple places to lookup what they need.

Tools are just part of the solution. Organizations are going to have to start considering support for feeds & consumability in their products & projects now to steer away from the old ways where data needs to be looked up in a dozen different places.