Jakob Nielsen just came out with his annual 10 Best Intranets of 2008. The winners are based in six different countries and five of the winners were US companies but surprisingly, there was only one high-tech company, SAP. The winners in alpha order are: Bank of America (US); Bankinter S.A. (Spain); Barnes & Noble (US); British Airways (UK); Campbell Soup Company (US); Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation (US); IKEA North America Service, LLC, (US); Ministry of Transport (New Zealand); New South Wales Department of Primary Industries (Australia); SAP AG (Germany).

The winning elements were design consistency in navigation and UX, integrated IA, focus on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people versus knowledge management, and better presented company news.

Some of the key findings were:
-News was a key homepage focus on most intranets
-Multimedia use growing in popularity
-Improved user experiences yielded productivity gains for tools such as employee directories to facilitate access to people with knowledge and single sign-on capability as employee self-service was key on most intranets
-The most used technologies used were SharePoint and Google Search Appliance
-Some intranets had unique names as opposed to just “Intranet” such as Discover, InSite, and Flagscape, Employee Self Service, my Campbell, Coldwell Banker Works, and US Retail Inside

Other trends which they discovered were:
-Increased personalization
-Integration of information sources, often resulting in a single “one-stop shopping” page
-Emphasis on mission-critical applications and information (such as sales targets)
-Improved event and project calendars
-Special sections to help orient new employees
-Prominent display of stock quotes and other financial information
-Integration of external and company news, often in the form of customizable feeds
-Alerts integration
-Redesigned and improved search features