Social media continues its’ persistent march across the firewall and into the day-to-day lives of intranet users, but executives and employees alike are less than thrilled with the end results. In fact, the initial overall rating on internal employee-only social media (intranet 2.0) is middling at best.

To be successful on the intranet, social media (intranet 2.0) cannot work in isolation; successful social computing requires effective integration and change management.

In the early days of social computing on the IBM intranet Big Blue built their own standalone applications – Dogear, Fringe, Beehive, and many others. While some like Beehive, a social networking application, were very successful (see Beehive builds buzz at IBM), most of IBM's social media tools were isolate, standalone applications and not at all integrated into the complete employee intranet experience.

More than one-quarter of all organizations with an intranet use a CMS to power their intranet; most CMS solutions are commercial, brand name solutions.

Preliminary data from The Social Intranet Study (855 respondents) reveals that while portal solutions such as WebSphere and SharePoint (also called a “development platform”) power one-third of intranets, but pure breed CMS solutions are nearly as popular.

Read the full blog post Open source CMS intranet on the new www.IntranetBlog.com