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There is business value hidden in intranets, but it's buried under a mess of inefficiences and de-centralized administration. That's the business problem Interwoven is trying to solve with a new Intranet Solution that comes on the heels of the company's upgrade of its TeamSite Web content management product.

The new Intranet Solution introduced this week is, of course, built on TeamSite. The concept is relatively simple, but the business problem is somewhat unique to intranets: How do enterprises de-centralize their intranet so non-technical employees can produce content, yet centralize the administration of several departmental intranets for the IT staff?

"What we're doing with our solution is addressing a couple of key challenges," said Anne Curran, senior product marketing manager for WCM solutions. Those challenges include how intranet contributors create and publish content, and how organizations cope with a proliferation of intranets, which can lead to redundant software and hardware expenses.

In developing its new intranet solution, Curran told Intranet Journal that Interwoven learned from its customers where there were problems with intranets as they relate to content management. What Interwoven saw was that different business units often go and buy departmental solutions, leaving the enterprise with redundancies, inefficiencies, and a mish-mash of technologies that can't work together. Curran also said there are a surprising number of homemade intranet solutions still in use.

"It definitely takes a lot of resources to run a content management system as the number of intranets, content, and content contributors increase," Curran said. Interwoven has customers that support thousands of intranet users, and also sells to global organizations that have thousands of intranets. "I think we've learned a lot from our customers."

With the number of intranets in some organizations reaching into the hundreds or thousands, Interwoven is touting TeamSite as the way to deploy multi-site Web content management and reduce hardware, software, and support costs. TeamSite uses a branching architecture that allows enterprises to manage multiple sites on a single server.

As for the end users, Curran said Interwoven is heavily invested in building solutions that get the end users involved. To that end, Interwoven's Intranet Solution offers desktop content publishing that lets content contributors create their content in authoring tools they use everyday, then drag and drop the content into a desktop folder called the ContentCenter briefcase to begin a wizard-driven publishing process.

There's also forms-based content publishing, courtesy of Interwoven's FormsPublisher product, which uses an easy fill-in-the-blanks system to let users contribute to the intranet without worrying about layout and presentation.

Interwoven's VisualPreview lets content owners review and edit right in the context of a Web site. There is also a drag-and-drop content import tool that lets users migrate content to new sites quickly and easily.

Those in review and approve roles can use the VisualPreview tool to visually annotate intranet pages that need edits or remarks. They can also integrate Interwoven's Intranet Solution with Outlook to be notified by e-mail when something requires their action.

Interwoven is also selling its Intranet Solution as a tool to help with compliance issues. In addition to simplifying the management of the intranet to help with compliance processes, there is a whole site versioning feature that can create snaphots for version control, archives, or can rollback the site to a previous version.