The Tube is IDEO’s intranet, a stylised, innovative online space designed purely around IDEO employees.

Every employee has a personal page that’s linked dynamically to their location, projects, project team members, skills, personal blogs and more. It’s a perfect intranet, directory, skill finder, blogging platform and social network, all wrapped up into one, seamless user experience.

Alex kindly shared a review copy of Step Two's 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards report with me. We've been talking on and off about it in advance of its publication and he assured me I would be very interested in some of the winners this year. Its a long report (nearly 200 pages) so I haven't had a chance read it in full! However, some highlights for me so far:

• IDEO's 'The Tube' people-centred intranet.
• Sabre Town - an in-house-developed internal social networking site.
• NYK News Room - while it could look better, this is a good example of using an enterprise wiki (in this case Confluence) as a platform to develop a solution.

Sabre Town in particular offers a great success story because their social networking site has apparently reported "Demonstrable saving of up to $500,000 in 2008 alone". So much for the Enterprise 2.0 doubters? Well, yes and no - these appear to be savings achieved through reduced wastage or significant time saving. Of course, unless you implement something like Sabre Town you aren't going to know what you are missing out on until you do.

While I don't think they were particularly strong winners, it was interesting to see the inclusion of companies that were looking beyond the browser screen and integrating toolbar gadgets and SMS as part of their intranet solution. These are all good signs, although I'm hopefully of more innovation in this space in coming years.

I'll try to post up some more thoughts about these examples in the next week or so. In the meantime, Step Two are publishing more excepts, further insights and screenshots on their blog - or just buy the full report for yourself.