Reading this blog post gives me deja vu. We launch our customized SharePoint intranet for 6000+ employees in a week from this Monday. We actually used all in house resources: 1 (100% dedicated) strategist/biz analyst; 4 (50 to 75% dedicated) IT resources; 2 (50% dedicated) Web developers; and 1 (5 to 10% dedicated) creative designer. It's definitely frustrating to work within SharePoint limits, but we were able to find workarounds for most of our barriers. The pain points were definitely worth the ability to get Web analytics, search and search analytics, a basic CMS, etc. out of the box with SharePoint - as opposed to paying third party vendors for the functionality. We were able to build our new redesigned Intranet at zero cost due to the fact that SharePoint was already installed as a team site/project site tool for employees. It's been a little less than two years in the works from planning to launch - 11 days and counting until launch! I like the guerilla marketing idea for communicating. We are using our pilot testers as 'messengers' and 'experts', signage, and video commercial parodies that employees can watch on our existing intranet.