You have probably experienced a bad intranet: It doesn't do anything that it should do well - distributing news, managing knowledge, documenting processes, or providing corporate services. Wanting to improve the situation, the intranet project team had the best of intentions, and they are good at what they do, but choosing presents (and designing intranets) is very difficult.

But there are three things you can do to choose good gifts (and good intranets): 

1. Ask all of your employees what they want.
2. Do some market research – review what other companies have done, then ask your employees again what they think.
3. Get input and approval from all stakeholders. 

Yes, this takes time, and it is not easy. But you will have a good intranet as a result.

An intranet needs five things

• Project or team spaces, and excellent knowledge management capabilities: Collaborative editing, feedback mechanisms, rich content, permissions management, and more.
• Personalization: Automatic customization based on expanded user profile fields, targeted news feeds and event invitations.
• Social networking: Microblogging for improved productivity and innovation within projects and teams.
• Expert search: Enhanced user profiles to provide a skills-based expert search.
• Mobile capabilities: Responsive theme or a mobile app.

The three things you need to do to choose a good intranet is a process, you can't buy an off-the-shelf product, can you?

With our extensive experience in designing custom intranets, we know what customers want. We have built Linchpin on top of Atlassian's affordable solution Confluence to provide all of these features and more. In more than 50 companies, Linchpin has received only positive feedback - it is the best 'Christmas present' a company could ask for.