Linchpin is tailored to an approach where there are areas for top-down communication (personalized dashboards, mostly read-only), restricted areas for projects and teams (free to write, but only for eligible employees) and open spaces (everyone can collaborate. Big companies enjoy the freedom to gradually adapt the system to their culture and the business case. Often slowly from quite restrictive towards pretty open and collaborative: Coming from an “Intranet 1.0”. Starting with an “Intranet 1.5” and slowly progressing towards a true “Intranet 2.0”.

Create space and edit permissions (Download)

Linchpin offers both passive and active personalization. Passive personalization is far more powerful and allows the system administrators to define personalization of all contents in the intranet based on user profile values. That means that the dashboard can be tailored to any variance of the profile. Common examples for content differentiation: Which location are you in? Which language do you speak? In which department do you work? Are you new? Will On-Boarding info be helpful for you?

The whole system can be fully personalized this way: Navigations (http://seibert.biz/navigationmenueditormarketplace), News (http://seibert.biz/enterprisenewsbundlemarketplace), Events (http://seibert.biz/easyevents), Teaser Boxes, Microblogs (http://seibert.biz/microblogusa), Apps, local support contacts and any other content in the system.

Atlassian follows a low touch high volume business model with the Confluence product. Thus it is paramount that users get to know the software fast and can work with it intuitively. Confluence has a very good user adoption rate and usually grows bottom up in organizations. I guess that it is a “rock star” especially compared to Microsoft SharePoint in the UX domain.

http://seibert.biz/intuitive (Download)

This is a native Confluence feature. The software allows you to follow users and build a network and get updates from the people you follow (http://seibert.biz/confluencefollowusers). It also allows you to subscribe to pages, trees and whole spaces and blogs within the application. Confluence has a thoughtful approach to notifications both in-app as via email with digests for multiple changes (http://seibert.biz/confluenceemailnotification).
http://seibert.biz/spaces , http://seibert.biz/follow

employee and experts search with skill management

http://seibert.biz/confluencepersonensuche & http://seibert.biz/customuserprofiledocumentation

http://seibert.biz/search 

We understand the underlying wishes and goals and consider them central to an intranet. There are however multiple flaws in the language of this feature request:

1. There is no such thing as a “project room”
   The requirements of teams to collaborate differ greatly. It does not help to try to consolidate them all into one unified approach and call that “project room”. This is as naive as telling people that every project can be solved in the same way. What we experience with our customers and their teams is, that almost every project has different requirements. Some have a lot of complexity to deal with. The project approach then needs to focus on people and their unique ability to deal with complexity. The toolset needs to adapt to fast communication, quick discussions and lightweight documentation tools. A more standardized project about rolling out a software into 20 countries however may have more guidelines and a bigger reporting element and the need to collect feedback about the approach. Comprehensive documentation, polls and microblogging may be good tools in such an environment.
   The main thing is: There is no one “project room” to reign all use cases. There is only an outstanding toolset with easy to use features and people trained and knowledgeable to exploit these features in every project and situation.

2. Altogether “without email” is not the right goal
   It is right, that email is the problem. Collaboration with email sucks. People hate it and it’s the one thing that we all want to go away. But email is unfortunately or fortunately (depends on view) part of the solution. Trying to get rid of email altogether is not the goal. There is a good reason why email is the standard fallback for today’s communication. It is ubiquitous. It is fast and easy. And it is also a good enhancement to an intranet. The right approach to email is to take out the time consuming parts and keep the informative elements like notifications that do not need direct action and will sit in the app later as well. Ultimately processing email should be fast and lightweight. Where you take hours today to process a heap of mails, minutes should be sufficient tomorrow, because everything is already “in place”. We can demo this in a personal meeting if you’re interested.

http://seibert.biz/rooms

Linchpin features a microblog (http://seibert.biz/microblogusa) to help generate quick and spontaneous user-generated content successfully. We believe that the old concept of discussion forums is no longer a recommendable path when planning a new intranet. Elements from a discussion forum are absorbed by wiki pages, microblogs, blogs and instant communication via HipChat.

http://seibert.biz/discussions, http://seibert.biz/discussions2 

This is more of a philosophical comment that reveals the wish for collaboration than a feature request. The Linchpin Intranet focuses on content and knowledge (simplistic you could refer to what Wikipedia is to the web). If you ask for social elements in the analogy with the web services like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp come to mind. The equivalents in Linchpin are the Microblog for threaded communication as in Twitter and Facebook and HipChat for instant messaging and group chat as in WhatsApp. http://seibert.biz/interaction 
http://seibert.biz/microblogusa 
http://seibert.biz/gruppenchatsimintranet 

Confluence does offer versioning and notifications for modified documents. These are standard features.
http://seibert.biz/doc, http://seibert.biz/doc2, http://seibert.biz/doc3  

Linchpin offers multiple ways to offer visual overviews of organizational hierarchies.

1. There is an automated process that will pull information from all user profiles and show a subset of the org chart with all superiors and subordinates of the current employees in his or her profile.

2. We also build a way to explore an org chart dynamically. This way you will always only see a defined level of hierarchies depending on your current position in the organization. But you can easily drill down into the whole organization and vice versa. http://seibert.biz/orgchartsdemovideo

3. Linchpin features a mature and leading diagramming solution called draw.io. You can manually create org charts, embed them in pages in Confluence and link to more information.

Confluence and Linchpin have an effective way when it comes to notifications. I admit that some people out there think the standard notification system is broken as it sends too many mails in their opinion.

Confluence has a very smart way to pull your employees into the conversation. Whenever someone interacts with a page or an element (e.g. liking, commenting, editing, enhancing, watching) the software will activate the auto-watch-feature for that user and that element. Future changes will be batched in a definable interval and send to the user via email or in-app-notification. This way natural conversations evolve and everyone is free to opt-out of the notifications whenever they want.

One approach to the Confluence mails is to configured the system differently which can be done within minutes (turn off auto-watch, …). You can even run Confluence without an email server.

Actually most of our customers learn, that Confluence has a productive. Way of sending notifications that fosters their collaboration internally. That’s where you can understand best, why email is the problem at one hand, but is part of the solution as well.

http://seibert.biz/intranetnotifications 
http://seibert.biz/benachrichtigungenimintranet

All features available. Add labels (Download)

Shared templates aka blueprints (Download)

Page restrictions (Download)

Space restrictions (Download)

Surveys (Download)

Page history (Download)

Document & file previews (Download)

Personal toolbox aka AppStore (Download)

Personal profile pages (Download)

Team calendar and export (Download) 

Personalized news (Download)
Personalized navigation (Download)

The user friendly rich text editor (Download)

Archiving options (Download)