Goog’s Internal Tools
Written on March 14, 2008
Found this via Brad Feld’s blog and thought it was a great peek into google’s internal intranet tools. Most big company folks I know say their intranets are a mess and unusable. I’ve seen a bunch of startups doing interesting stuff in this space. However, it seems like google has tried something different on their own. I wonder how useful it has been for their folks.
Automated status report management with search is pretty killer idea, but doesn’t make writing status reports anymore fun (thus hard to get done)…even though it is critical for project management.
I built an ideas portal at microsoft and it got lots of content initially, but the pipeline for reviewing / approving / implementing was not there. Google seems like they’ve nailed that aspect with top down buyin & committed time to review and even fund some “out there crazy” ideas.
Expert search is just freaking awesome assuming people update their profiles. Stupid that it is so hard and takes human supernodes inside of a company to help keep information flowing between people.
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