Collaboration and communication are the foundation of building an intranet for any business. Large companies tend to invest sizable budgets on developing their Intranets to encourage greater collaboration but you don’t really have to look very far to see how to get there without having to spend a small fortune.

Jakob Nielsen published a brilliant report on the 10 Best Intranets of 2009 which highlights not just the best examples of business Intranets but also the latest trends and direction businesses are taking with their Intranets. Social networking platforms and features are among the key ingredients of a good intranet platform. In his report, Jakob says…

“This year’s winners showed a substantial increase in both collaboration support and social networking features. Although inspired by the open Internet’s “Web 2.0″ sites, these features often have a much stronger business model within the enterprise, simply because they’re more useful and less subject to noise and information pollution by bozos.”

The most symbolic instantiation of this trend might be at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, where employees can add their own videos to the corporate TV network. Quite the enterprise YouTube.

The ability to add and share photos videos, blogs, collaborate on discussion groups IS the evolution of the intranet. It’s the way most professionals enjoy communicating and collaborating outside the business environment on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Skype or Twitter among others. So why not integrate a social networking software platform into a business website?

• It serves the purpose of collaboration as well as communication
• Employees love social networking features which makes adoption a breeze
• There are some great social networking software platforms easily available and highly customizable which resolves the problem of having to go through a large development project to build an intranet
• It can work out far more cost effective and easily scalable

It’s building a social / community network within an organization. While very large organizations may still need to explore developing their own intranet from the ground upwards, small to midsized businesses can surely find all they need to collaborate the smart way. After all every business is a social network in itself right?