(SEATTLE, WA) “The main functionality we were looking for is solved by Facebook, and so far the satisfaction rate has been stellar so don't want to fix what's not broken,” says Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications, Serena Software.

The successful software company known for helping build other companies intranets using its Collage content management system or mash-up software no longer has an intranet of its own – they use Facebook. Well, Facebook isn’t in fact used for everything; Sharepoint houses private documents (login is required) and HiveLive is being used for sharing documents and additional collaboration.

“Fact is less than 2% of the material on our existing (previous) intranet was deemed confidential,” adds Arteaga. “Today, we use Facebook primarily for pictures, status updates, and team building exercises. There are a number of customers we speak to on the FB platform, as well as vendors. However, no specific business applications reside on FB as of yet.”

Serena is a growing software firm with a highly distributed workforce: 850 employees in 18 different countries, and 35% of its staff work from home – a true 21^st century company.

Now it’s worth noting that Facebook doesn’t offer what is termed a traditional intranet and it has very definitive limits. For example, it doesn’t offer employee self-service tools, a searchable news section or a corporate store.

So while the intranet is more of a collaboration platform that is supported by a document base in Sharepoint, the move to Facebook has been a success with a more than 90% penetration rate within global employee.

“Do I think that Facebook has a future in the Enterprise?” asks Arteaga. “Most definitely, but only if they want it.”

“So far we have received no indication from Facebook that they are looking at solving Enterprise concerns. Till then, we will continue to use it as we have, but we will not be investing heavily to port business applications onto this platform and will look to HiveLive instead.”

As I reported last week, developers have created about 1000 business applications for Facebook… but most of them are fun or social in nature. One application, Feedheads, allows the users to “share the feed items you like with your different friends and networks while also displaying your shared items on your profile.” It also works with Google Reader and NewsGator. So, in other words, think of the collaborative calendar offered by Lotus Notes (or Outlook) where the user can see the schedules of others. Feedheads allows you to see a lot more than their schedule depending on what that user or colleague wants to share (e.g. interesting articles, reports on the competition, meeting reminders, etc.).

“The problem for any business considering Facebook is that it’s a determinedly consumer play, to the extent that I don’t think it can ever seriously fly in the enterprise,” says analyst and ZDnet writer Phil Wainewright. “Facebook trades free functionality in return for attention and relationship data — and users give up a lot of their control over that data. Businesses aren’t willing to make that trade-off.

Serena is definitely a trailblazer and they, and other companies like them will influence Facebook to evolve it to include more business applications and features that may enable it to become a legitimate enterprise or intranet platform. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft would like to acquire it, but another reason why Facebook’s owners may in fact hold onto it, and expand its horizons with true enterprise intranet services.

CONTINUE THE DISCUSSION: Come join the discussion on Facebook on the Intranet Global Forum.

Or join us for the conference session on Facebook atEnterprise3 conference in San Diego. The session will feature a panel discussion with Serena Software's VP of Communications, Kyle Arteaga; Senior Director of Optaros, John Eckman; myself, and moderated by Jarrod Gingras, Analyst with CMSWatch.com.