The "Rencontres Internationales des Responsables Intranet" took place in Paris last week. It was the event for  intranet managers from several big multi-national firms and public administrations from all over France and Europe.

For an event that boasts a focus on technology - there were no bloggers present in the audience!! There were no tools to facilitate blogging - no plugs!! No wifi!! In fact, the handout was a giant heavy binder - it was not even a simple URL.

No one present was really surprised by this format though.

The presentations featured good projects, but projects that should have gone live 5 years ago, not today! All presenters were talking about collaboration and personalization, but were confusing (1) collaboration and document sharing and (2) personalization and profiling or look-and-feel customization. There was no trace of social computing. No trace of rich-featured people - don't understand this! and topic centricity. No trace of Flow. Just the old plain email and document centric world. The result is that we assisted to old school presentations (PowerPoint) of old school projects.

Back to the future, live.

The project that emerged (and really kicked ass - excuse my French!) was the project created and developed by Dassault Systemes: DS InterAction 2.0 (disclaimer: it's one of our clients). This project set the bar very high and the audience was extremely enthusiastic.

Tarik Lebtahi and Nicolas Cerisier, the project creators, presented a project done internally with Guillaume Couste and Philippe Guillaume: DS InterAction 2.0. This corporate intranet, a unique technological platform, is internally created and developed and makes good use of the technologies and social logic of personalized pages, blogs, wikis, rich-media and social bookmarks. It encompasses also a more classical online document manager as well as a series of widgets and portlets that surface ERP, CRM and other enterprise-wide applications. Information flows easily thanks to features that enable in one click the transfer of data between blogs, wikis and other integrated bases. It is both user and topic centric, with rich profiles and full-featured communities. It is meant to sustain communication, participation and collaboration. The vision behind it is that the Intranet is to be the hub of collective intelligence and a principal place for collaboration (i.e. the intranet as a platform).

What is outstanding in this project is:
- The clear and up-to-date vision that sustains the roadmap;
- The perpetual beta approach;
- The focus on design and interconnected features that attracts people, favors and sustains knowledge sharing;
- The attention to details and implied logic while designing micro-functionalities;
- The hand-in-hand collaboration between people from Internal Communication and IT Teams;
- The project management approach that favors the motivation of project members (a good deal of live features come from personal initiatives of DS developers);
- The knowledge of business and the will to sustain locally contextualized needs (possible by a flexible and custom articulation of features).
- The comprehension that real new technology contributes to making the office a better place and boosts innovation and performance.

What a real pleasure to work with this enlightened team and a true honor to contribute to such a KA!! project.