What 2010 will bring to company intranets

By now, you’ve read every list imaginable of what to expect this year in public relations, social media, search engine optimization, media relations and so on. But what about your intranet—the medium used by many companies to communicate with employees. Here’s what you can expect.

1. SharePoint will continue to dominate. All hail the king, SharePoint!

SharePoint has become the single biggest, most pervasive intranet platform of all time (present in 50–60 percent of all midsize to large organizations). Although SharePoint is still minimally used for department- and team-level document sharing and collaboration, more organizations will use it as the enterprise intranet platform.

SharePoint 2010, due to market in late spring, is vastly improved over the former version, MOSS 2007. Many organizations will upgrade to 2010 and begin to use the new version as the enterprise intranet platform.

What’s more, the cost of entry for taking on SharePoint has never been lower as Microsoft SharePoint is “in the cloud” (see point No. 5) with SharePoint Online. SharePoint online already boasts more than a million users, and unlike the previous SharePoint Online, the 2010 version promises to have “near feature parity” (with only small exceptions) to the install version.