Free, free, free. Just when we’ve become so adept at negotiating fair contracts and grappling with creative pricing schedules, companies start changing their business models and offering products for free. Powerize.com offers free content (see page 1), and Intranets.com (www.intranets.com) offers a free intranet. 

Intranets.com was the first to offer a free intranet portal. Others are sure to follow suit, or at least close to it. Planet Intra 
(www.planet-intra.com), IntraSmart (www.mindbridge.com), Decosoft’s Intranet in a box (www.decosoft.com), and Joydesk (www.joydesk.com) are just a few of the insta-intranets out there. Unlike Intranets.com, however, all of these have some cost attached. Intranets.com does not charge for anything except telephone support. E-mail support is free, and, in our experience, answers arrive within hours of sending a request. 

Yes, the Intranets.com revenue model is banner and targeted advertising. I am usually quite impatient with banner advertising, but the ads on our intranet are not obtrusive at all. In fact, the targeted ads that appear within “My Assistant” (a box in the lower right screen) are neatly contained and link to companies offering items relevant for any business, from office supplies to subscriptions with RoweCom (www.rowe.com). These seem to be limited to 10 ads, simply listed as hyperlinked titles.

We have been using Intranets.com at Dysart & Jones for the past 2 months. Incredibly easy to set up by whomever you choose as an administrator, the intranet is customizable with your company or group identity and provides group calendaring, document management, and group announcements. Your intranet is password-protected, with 25 MB of disk space. The “group members” application allows you to post and search contact information for intranet members, and the “group contacts” can be set up to function as a database of your key contacts, suppliers, etc. 

An added bonus is the personalized newsfeed, “powered by NewsEdge,” as they say. We’ve been alerted to several useful articles in the Internet, publishing, and other categories we’ve selected. The main page also allows you to search for stock-type financial news and conduct full-text searches using NewsEdge, but these are the weakest features of this product. 

For us, the beauty of this product is not only the price, but also the ease of working on documents. Given that we work virtually with colleagues all over North America, we were constantly e-mailing huge attachments back and forth, struggling to keep track of which version was the most recent. Now we save a document in HTML and post it to the intranet for group editing.

Intranets.com has been developed by ideallab!, described as the “incubator” of ventures such as eToys.com, GoTo.com, and CarsDirect.com. Interestingly, Bill Gross, the founder, started Knowledge Adventure, known for its quality kids software, and many of the other principals within Intranets.com have come from Lotus Development Corp., and PictureTel. Intranets.com is being carefully positioned for the small and medium corporate market as an alternative to wide area networks or the hassle of supporting an intranet. The latest move has been to integrate Intranets.com’s tools into a free “virtual office” for clients of BusinessMall.com. 

While it may not have the sophistication of intranets within many organizations, Intranets.com is certainly an option for small to mid-size organizations, committees, associations, project teams, or for those new to the world of intranets who simply want to test the tools. 
 

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