Jakob Nielsen has issued his view on the 10 Best Intranets of 2007. The full report is quite pricey but the summary is available for free and offers a peep over what is currently being the focus of the very best intranets.

The expected is mentioned (more use of multimedia, good use of web usability principles, multi-language, etc.) but what I was most curious about, though, was on the use of web 2.0 ideas in organisational intranets.

On his post Jakob Nielsen Hates Enterprise 2.0 Jerry Bowles criticises Nielsen for his views on social tools as portrayed in the summary report mentioned. I confess I do not understand Nielsen to be criticising social tools. Rather, the renowned usability consultant, is defending the use of these tools in context and for a purpose, rather than merely because of the hype currently being generated around wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, etc..

In fact, what Bowles sees as contradictions, is just Nielsen saying these tools are not good for their own sake but rather for the sake of helping people be more productive. That is why he mentions the case of Microsoft's employee directory search using the concept of degrees of separation, of the National Geographic Society using a wiki for acronyms and specialized terminology, and of Microsoft's use of internal blogs.

And, who can disagree with him? At the end of the day, companies should not be investing on jazzy functionality is that is not helping their employees producing faster and better. But, isn't this a piece of old news?