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Sorce Intranet winning Intranet Journal's Product of the Year Best Design Suite award may have surprised our U.S. readers. After all, the company only has three or four American clients, said John Nicklin, vice president of sales.

But perhaps that will change, and U.S. companies will start to learn what 200 mostly European companies (representing 150,000 end users) already know: Sorce creates an outstanding intranet design tool.

"We saw the names that were short-listed, and obviously there were some very good global names and we were over the moon to have won it," said Nicklin. "I think it'll help us grow the company over the next 12 months."

Ambitious Beginnings

Sorce began in 2000, and is based in Newbury, which is 40 miles west of London. From the start, it focused on creating an intranet, extranet, and portal creation tool that would help both small and FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) companies.

With its intranet creation tool, Sorce has always delivered a combination of communication tools and process tools. Rather than thinking of intranets as purely communication tools for distributing messages, the developers think a good intranet also delivers process tools for performing business tasks in an easy, streamlined way.

Sorce's developers also believe that intranet creation and deployment should take weeks, not months or years. Since intranets are meant to simplify business processes and increase productivity, creating one shouldn't be a major hurdle.

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Version 7

One big reason that Sorce took this award is that our readers were impressed by the improvements to its latest version, Sorce V7. With this release, the developers focused on business improvement tools and on making the product even more efficient.

Sorce users saw improvements to the document management and expense features with this release, as well as to the alerting capabilities. Users are now able to subscribe to any part of their intranet, so that they automatically receive a task when that area changes. The task alerts them to the presence of new information, so that they can act on it.

Version 7 offers big improvements to the program's human resources tools. It's now easy to conduct a 360 degree review, where everyone who works with the employee being appraised -- not just his or her immediate boss -- contributes comments. The program also delivers improvements to the event management and resource booking tools, allowing users to book meeting room, equipment, refreshments, and meeting participants all within the same interface.

Sorce's templating has been given a major makeover with version 7, allowing every user to create new pages and new areas of the intranet in minutes.

"I think the main reasons why it became very popular is that we put a lot of effort into the usability of the product, making sure non-technical people could maintain and author all parts of the intranet, giving them the ability to maintain and correct their own pages," said Nicklin. "Really, it takes the emphasis off stronger IT requirements."

Looking Ahead

The people behind Sorce hope to use this award as a springboard to reach a larger American audience. They plan to participate in trade shows and conferences starting this fall and are looking for U.S. partners.

Before the year is over, the company will roll out version 8. While Nicklin couldn't comment on particular features, he said that it would focus on delivering business benefits and driving efficiencies.

If Sorce is able to make a connection with U.S. businesses and version 8 is as successful as version 7, we're sure to see it back on our winner's list next year.

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