WebEx – known for hosting online web meetings – has agreed to purchase Intranets.com for a mere $45 million. To put that in that perspective, that works out to a mere $150 per customer (300,000 paying users).

An online meeting company buys small market intranet hosting business?!?

WebEx conducts online meetings and competes with Microsoft’s Live Meeting. Intranets.com hosts small business intranets (less than 100 employees on average). In their press release WebEx states that the acquisition will allow them to “offer companies of all sizes a comprehensive, cost-effective, on-demand web collaboration suite that includes both real-time and asynchronous capabilities.”

One of the real drivers behind the purchase appears to be Intranets.com own web and audio conferencing service which it launched early last year. As PC World puts it, “The move was aimed directly at undercutting Microsoft's Live Meeting software and WebEx's service.”  In other words, Intranets.com was mowing WebEx’s lawn for a much cheaper price. WebEx isn’t cheap and Intranets.com was offering web conferencing at the low-low monthly subscription price of $199 (a license for up to five presenters).

I don’t blame WebEx for wanting to do away with Intranets.com. However, WebEx claims that Intranets.com will continue to run as a wholly owned subsidiary and plans to keep all 82 employees. Not surprisingly, WebEx is immediately taking over the Intranets.com web conferencing service. No doubt the price will go up sometime in the near future.

A little more perspective... if Intranets.com has 300,000 paying users, and judging by their pricing plan the average user price is about $10 per month, that equates to about $36 million in revenue per year. The company was sold for $45 million.

The sales price makes me wonder how viable the Intranets.com business has been. Very curious indeed.

Last week I blogged on “Microsoft’s Worse Kept Secret”: the merging of Sharepoint and Content Management Server (CMS) into a single group offer.

Well, Microsoft reminded me about the importance of perspective and point of view.

John Amyotte, a solutions specialist from Microsoft Canada’s portal group, offers the MS perspective on merging products into a single group. “Merging” and “group” yes,” says Amyotte, a 5-year veteran of the content management industry. “But they are still two separate products. The goal is for it to be transparent like Sharepoint portal and Windows Sharepoint services. And this is what a suite should be….one UI.”

Amyotte stresses that CMS is not disappearing. “Just to confirm CMS is not being phased out. In fact, the next release has more R&D funding going into it then the entire history of the product.

To be precise, hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested into the new Sharepoint and CMS bundling project with the offer due next Christmas (2006). 

“One of the challenges in the ECM and portal space is that if you want to create web content, manage a document, and collaborate with peers via email and instant messaging you end up toggling between numerous solutions that do not talk well to each other.”

To overcome the multi-client challenge Microsoft envisions a more user-friendly environment that allows the user to accomplish more without having to use multiple products or interfaces.

“Multiple user interfaces (UI's) across a large organization creates a user adoption challenge. Some vendors have tried to solve this challenge by acquiring other companies, but the reality is the products are written in various languages and never truly integrate. You still end up with multiple solutions and UI's that don't integrate.”

This of course is nothing new as others like Plumtree and Vignette already have integrated portal-content management-search products. However, Microsoft is not known for subscribing to the first-mover model (think of the browser, instant messaging, and content management and portal products to name a few).

But why settle at simply integrating two or three products? “The intent of the next release is to have a transparent integration between CMS, Sharepoint, and Office,” reveals Amyotte.   

“Users create content with the tools they use everyday such as Word or Outlook and the content can easily be used to create a web page on the external site, a document repository for collaboration, a confidential document on the global extranet, or a personalized announcement for the intranet also distributed via handheld devices.” 

Big things cooking in Redmond. But we’ll have to wait another 16 or 17-months before we can taste...

Well the cat is finally out of Gates’ richly tailored bag. Microsoft is now publicly hinting what so many knew to be true about a year ago (or more): MS is merging Sharepoint and Content Management Server (CMS) into a single group offer.

Bruce Dunwoodie was one of the first to report this on CMSWire. “In one of the first public statements on the topic, Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s group vice president of Information Worker Product Group, indicated that the future of the two products was around more common technologies and an integration, if not outright convergence,” writes the intrepid Dunwoodie.

“We do think of SharePoint and CMS very much together. CMS is running Internet sites, SharePoint for intranet sites and team collaboration,” says Capossela.

Of course this is not a formal admission which MS is shy to do. However, as I blogged back on April 10 (see Microsoft’s Intranet Portal Innovates), Gates & company are investing hundreds of millions of dollars and a dedicated team of some 300 people to beefing-up Sharepoint and fully integrating a new and improved content management system (Content Management Server as it is known today).

This is serious, serious business for MS. Gates et al are not intent to play second fiddle to Plumtree and IBM in the enterprise intranet portal market (if you call 31 million users a ‘second fiddle’) and understand that linking MS-Office and content management with a portal product and .NET could be a market clincher for them.... if they execute accordingly.

This new Sharepoint offering however will not be ready until December 2006 (planned date) which gives the competition a little lead time to up the ante.

Amazon.com is not a model for site design, layout and usability. In these areas, it fails many tests.

When I told this to the audience of some 300 at last month’s IABC International Conference in Washington, D.C., (see The Site Is Right 2005) I was not surprised when I was challenged.

“How can you say that?” exclaimed one woman. “You can’t argue with Amazon’s success!”

Amazon.com’s success is largely due to its first mover status, unparalleled selection, innovative technology and entrepreneurial approach (strategy), and last but not least, it’s brand.

Amazon’s success is in spite of usability short-comings – which are many on the Amazon.com site. This success proves an important point: usability takes a backseat to strategy and content when determining web success (Ward’s Principal #1).

This principal is equally true on the corporate intranet. However, most websites and intranets don’t enjoy the resources that make Amazon successful in the absence of adherence to key usability principals.

As Jakob Nielsen put it in his most recent Alertbox column regarding Amazon.com, "Many design elements work for Amazon.com mainly because of its status as the world's largest and most established e-commerce site. Normal sites should not copy Amazon's design."

Notwithstanding the importance of strategy and planning (see the Nexus of Intranet Success) usability should not be over-looked as it’s particularly important to the intranet.

You’ll forgive usability gurus for harping on the life-or-death necessity of user friendly sites as they champion the usability cause with good reason. Users don’t see strategy and process. Users see the tangible qualities of a website and particularly cry aloud when access to those tangible assets is impeded.

In fact, the number one complaint of intranet users is: “I can’t find anything.” It’s the number one complaint in any intranet survey or focus group I’ve ever conducted.

The number one user priority is speed. Users want to get at the information they want as quickly as possible. This speed of information access is often severely impeded on an organically and/or decentralized intranet that usually plays poor cousin to the Internet site. This challenge was reinforced by yet another client and its users when conducting intranet focus groups for a large consumer package company in Chicago today.

Case in point: time and time again users tell me that they don’t mind scrolling down pages if it’s content they’ve sought out. However, on an intranet home page, they don’t want any scrolling. They want to glance at the home page to see what’s new and then quickly retrieve whatever information they are seeking. Employees don’t want to scroll down and they don’t want to guess at what they may be missing ‘below the fold.’ This is almost a unanimous finding amongst intranet users in the dozens of focus groups I’ve conducted – regardless of industry or company size.

However, using Amazon.com as the comparison, its home page contains about four screens of extremely busy and crowded content.

Amazon.com’s outrageously busy and crowded home page.

Yet despite this critical usability faux pas (and there are many on the Amazon.com site), Amazon is still a huge success.

Amazon.com proves that strategy and content are critical ingredients in developing a successful online presence. However, unless you enjoy the resources, brand and patents that Amazon enjoys, usability should never be overlooked.

Merril Lynch recently completed a survey of 100 CIOs in the United States and Europe on Internet readiness.

Asking them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being ‘finished’), the CIO's where asked how far each respective company had progressed in implementing its Internet strategy.

The average response: 6.5. That’s 65% complete.

Unfortunately employees take a backseat to customers and the greater public in most companies and not surprisingly the intranet is always plays poor cousin to the Internet.

While not a priority for the vast majority of companies my guess is that if the same question was asked about the intranet the rating would be far less – perhaps a three or a four.

The paradigm is changing for some, but most executives still view the intranet as a cost center and have no understanding or inkling on the potential return on investment for an intranet (see Finding ROI white paper). Yet if most CIOs and their fellow CXOs knew the stories behind the billions of dollars in ROI realized at stalwarts such as Oracle, IBM, Cisco and others, perhaps their minds would change.

Sadly, according to a study undertaken by Prescient Digital Media of some 240 intranet managers and consultants in North America, Europe and beyond, only 6% of organizations undertake ongoing, specific measurement of their corporate intranet investment. Twenty-six per cent of organizations undertake occasional measurement, and 51% do no measurement, or don’t know if they do (or guess); 18% are considering specific ROI measurements.

How does the intranet rate at your company? All good stories and bad stories are welcome!

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Mike Pastore, editor of the Intranet Journal, has written an interesting analysis on the evolution of paid content and syndication in For Paid Content, the Times They Are a Changin'

“For decades, the way to keep the knowledge workers in your organization on top of industry news was to subscribe to the services of a content aggregator like Factiva, Dialog, or LexisNexis. The evolution of intranets and electronic delivery fit well with this approach, but now the amount of free content available to people with an Internet connection is changing the rules of the game.

The "deep Web" — online content that sits behind subscriptions and members-only barriers — and the not-so-deep Web (free Web content) collided with the launch of the Yahoo Subscriptions beta last month. The Yahoo service, which added LexisNexis and Factiva to its list of content aggregators and publishers this week, lets users search both the open Web and the deep Web in one search. And if you already have a subscription to Yahoo Subscription's publishing partners, you get to use the Yahoo search technology to search multiple publishers and aggregators as well as the open Web.”

For Paid Content, the Times They Are a Changin'