Intranets, on the other hand, haven’t progressed an inch since, oh, say 2001. While the web has witnessed the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true web-based applications (like Writely and AjaxWrite), the intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago.

I know because intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see a lot of intranets, and have since…well, since before the word “intranet” was adopted. I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. And although there are plenty of fine features and functionality, there is little to suggest intranet teams are adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” web.

Sure, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us (although I have heard of two companies taking initial steps in this direction), audience ranking (along the lines of Digg and Memeorandum, social networks ( like LinkedIn, file sharing services like Flickr and YouTube or AJAXish tools like PageFlakes (which has become my default home page).

All of these utilities make perfect sense forintranets, and most of them would be simple to implement. Simple, in any case, compared to, say, getting an SAP portal up and running. Social tagging would let employees find intranet content based on bookmarks their colleagues have asigned. One cmpany, for instance, calls its mailroom “Document Delivery Services;” there is no reference to “mailroom” anywhere on the intranet. If one employee found the DDS site and tagged it “mailroom,” other employees would be able to find it by searching the bookmark site for the word that makes the most sense to them.

Digg-like ranking would let employees prioritize company news and information based on what is most important to them. (The company could continue to push news it believes is so important that every employee should see it.) Social networks that emulate the likes of LinkedIn would let employees in large organizations make contact with others who can help with a project or assignment through trusted intermediaries. And personzlied web start pages like PageFlakes and ProtoPage do exactly what web portals do (at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time it takes companies to implement portals like the ones sold by Plumtree and Oracle.

Any of these kinds of services would make intranets infinitely more valuable, compelling, and usable for employees. So why aren’t intranet teams making the slightest move to keep up with developments on the web? There are several factors at play:

• IT departments have invested too much time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and are in no hurry to move in a different direction.
• Corporate IT staffs-some of them, anyway-are utterly clueless about what’s happening on the web. They don’t know online AJAX from the kitchen cleanser.
• Communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken?
• Corporate communicators-many of them-are utterly cluelessa bout what’s happening on the web. They wouldn’t know what Digg was even if they’d been dug.
• Too much of an investment has been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for
• The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now?

Most companies are struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are antithetical to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content.

There are, I’m sure, other obstacles standing in the way of intranet evolution. There are also, I’m sure, some intranets somewhere that have undertaken efforts to adopt some of these tools. I haven’t seen them; have you? Intranet teams should start taking a hard look at their stagnant intranets and how they can be improved-to the benefit of the organization through enhanced productivity-using the many elements that make up the read-write web.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

And, he says, it should be free so consumers didn’t have to pay $499 for Microsoft Office.

Robertson has just produced such a tool called AjaxWrite, released last week. All you need to use it is a browser and an internet connection.

I’ve been taking AjaxWrite for a spin, and it is very nice indeed as this screenshot indicates (click on it for a larger image):

It took me a few seconds to realize that I’m working in a word processor using only a browser interacting with it online, and not in an application launched from my own computer. Its interface certainly look familiar. It’s extremely fast, too – from clicking the link on the AjaxWrite site to beginning to type took less than 5 seconds. Wow! But that’s just a couple of uses – how it would be in the long term with lots of users and the vagaries of the internet is another matter.

Robertson believes AjaxWrite is a significant development:

[] ajaxWrite is the first Ajax program which looks and operates like a traditional program, complete with menus and toolbars, as users have come to expect. This means users get all the benefits of a familiar PC application interface, with the advantages of a program delivered over the net. This means ajaxWrite is a free web service – it’s always up to date with constant improvements taking place on our servers, behind the scenes.

I’d tend to agree that it is significant for the reasons he mentions. Another one is AjaxWrite’s ability to let you save what you’re writing to a file on your own computer rather than on a remote server. And that file can be opened in Word. I had a few problems with that feature, though (described in my AjaxWrite document, ie, the screenshot). It is beta, don’t forget.

Other server Ajax-based word processors like Writely also offer such a feature. Writely is now owned by Google, incidentally. I’ve tried Writely before and it’s also good. But AjaxWrite undoubtedly has the current lead in familiar look-and-feel as well as speed.

So what about products like AjaxWrite as Word killers?

I just can’t see it, certainly not yet. For many companies, particularly big ones, I don’t believe price will be the primary factor when they decide on productivity apps like word processors. And I can’t imagine someone in an organization who makes decisions about such apps across the enterprise saying, “Ok, we’re switching!” And if you’re someone who works with big companies, as I do, exchanging lots of Office documents with people there, that’s going to influence your own decisions about what apps you use. (Mind you, this is all a very 2006 view.)

In any event, Microsoft certainly isn’t going to just sit there and watch market erosion in an application that’s part of a productivity suite in a business division that accounts for a quarter of their current total revenue. And Office 2007, previously known as Office 12, is coming soon (later than expected, though).

Still, AjaxWrite is very nice indeed, an elegant application that’s at the current leading edge of what developers can do with Ajax. It will undoubtedly have immediate appeal for a lot of people.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Another nifty Web 2.0 project has emerged on the web at ajaxWrite. It looks and works similar to Word, all within a Firefox browser (no IE or Opera or Safari support yet). We have to note here that Firefox’s commendable share of the browser market hovers around 10 percent globally.

Some observers have found ajaxWrite great cause for excitement. Witness Mike Arrington’s breathless quote at TechCrunch: “Will things like AjaxWrite have an impact on Microsoft’s Office revenues over time? Yeah, it must.”

“The Microsoft Office empire might soon get challenged by the Web-based disruptors,” USA Today blogger Kevin Maney posted.

Maybe we should politely file MP3.com/Lindows founder Michael Robertson’s latest effort under “nice, but lacking.”

Lacking how? Alec Saunders has the opinion that ajaxWrite compares to another Microsoft text editing tool, WordPad:

Perhaps the best observation about ajaxWrite comes from Robertson himself, as cited by a commenter on Kederosky’s blog: “The impact of this shift in how software is delivered to users cannot be understated.”

In his Medina estate, Bill Gates may be reading that statement and saying, “True dat, dawg.” Or words to that effect.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.