A little while ago I shared my feelings about the state of most corporate intranets. To summarise, I felt they are hard to use, don’t fit people’s mental models and fail to address key use cases.
As is often the case when I write about a competitive marketplace like intranet software, following the article I was inundated with emails from various software developers touting their solution to the intranet dilemma.
Normally I bin such emails, but one caught my eye. It was from a company called Jostle and they seemed particularly passionate that things needed to change. I took the time to visit their site and have to say I was impressed by what they are offering. As you can see from the video below, this is a significant departure from what one normally thinks of as an intranet.
Although there is no doubt Jostle looks like an enormous step forward, I imagine some will be put off by the fact that it cannot be self hosted.
Also, although they address all of the killer applications normally associated with an intranet, they are vague about how much the application can be tailored to your organisations specific needs. And as I said in my previous post, this is an important requirement. You cannot simply throw technology at an intranet and hope it fits your business. You certainly cannot expect users to just adapt to the softwares way of working.
That said, from a user experience point of view this is an enormous step forward. It is great to see people innovating in this area.