With the arrival of SharePoint 2010 lots of new and interesting features arrive within most corporate firewalls. Old SharePoint licenses are renewed, new budgets are approved and new features are implemented. However is recreating your new Intranet with new features the best you can do? Should you be renewing your SharePoint license for new features in your Intranet?

Facebook might be better

Give it some thought, especially since you might already be considering to stop all developments for your Intranet. Every new feature seems to be challenged if it was worth the time, the money and the effort to thrive adoption. Why not use Facebook as your Intranet? It is likely that your colleagues are spending more time on Facebook than on your Intranet already and are having a better experience on Facebook than they ever did on the current Intranet.

Facebook is an immense Juggernaut with more than 400 million users (one out of every 4 people with access to an Internet connection has an account), billions of minutes are spend daily on Facebook and what is even better: your colleagues already adopted it, and even your business partners already have a presence on Facebook.  So why create something new, while you can build your Intranet on an existing platform that is fully adopted by your colleagues? Even better: you don’t have to pay for development nor for hosting, since Facebook is taking care of that. And if you are afraid to make the move towards Facebook as an Intranet, keep in mind that Serena Software already did it a long time ago, with the introduction of Facebook Fridays

So why wait? Create that Facebook group for your company and let your colleagues join. The interface is familiar, almost everybody has got his profile filled in fully and people are already visiting Facebook on a regular basis (unless you are blocking Internet access).

Facebook is public by default

However keep in mind that Facebook is a public platform, and therefore it might not be the best for sharing confidential information, nor there is an app for the integration of your SAP HR system. If that holds you back to go full fledge into Facebook, just use your Facebook group as a portal to get your colleagues to the news on the Intranet (which could be based on SharePoint 2010).

Save money, thrive adoption. Not every successful solution has to start inside your firewall or should be custom build. Use the tools your colleagues already know, use the tools that they already selected as the tools they prefer to use.