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We're all going through tough financial times, from single income families struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments to large organizations trying to justify their own existence. Words like "bailout" and "stimulus" have made their way into common everyday language. And there's a pungent smell of economic doom in the air as everyone equips themselves as best they can with an ineffectual Wile E. Coyote style umbrella. With this looming economic menace on the horizon, what chance does your poor intranet have against your organization's managers who are locking their checkbooks away and looking for anyway to cut costs?

Because of the latent value of intranets, some still view them as being somewhat non-essential, a tool that's nice to have but not business critical. So how do you justify the continued existence of your intranet, convince management to support an intranet re-design, or attract new users to the system? Tough times call for tough measures:

Choose free, open source over proprietary software

Software procurement is the most outwardly visible cost associated with intranet development and management. If your organization is suffering from tough economic times, purchasing new or additional software is going to be next to impossible to justify. So when you're in dire need of new tools during these times of financial constraints, what better price is there than free?

Choosing free, yet established, open source software is a perfect way to avoid the rolling costs associated with proprietary software: Future upgrades, technical support and documentation, and multi-seat corporate licenses.

If you somehow managed to convince management to invest in a commercial proprietary tool during this belt-tightening environment and then end up not using it for whatever reason -- the software doesn't suit your current infrastructure, doesn't support company specific business processes, isn't flexible enough for your needs -- you're going to have a lot to answer for. It can even cost you your job or be the death knell of your intranet.

Free open source software allows you to perform intranet R&D with no monetary investment. This way you don't raise any managerial eyebrows. You don't even have to let management know you're working on anything until you're ready for production. And should the open source tool turn out to be something other than what you wanted, no money would have been lost in the process.

One word of warning though: If your entire organization is based on a standard proprietary technology backbone (Microsoft, for example), be very careful about introducing a whole new open source solution stack into the mix. You don't want to turn your intranet into some hideous Frankenstein's monster, requiring technological bridges to tie two worlds together.

Introduce Web 2.0 tools

Nothing will reinvigorate an intranet within the user community and further justify the system's existence during tough financial times than introducing new and useful tools. But if money is tight, how on earth can you expect or convince management to invest in new tools? The good news is you don't have to.

Free open source Web 2.0 tools can inject a lot of life into a pre-existing intranet at little financial cost. Plus, many of these tools require little in the way of real development so you don't have to worry about the added expense of hiring IT talent or pulling IT personal away from other, more complicated projects.

Once implemented, tools such as blogs or wikis can turn regular end user from spectators into active participants who might not have otherwise wanted to be an "official" intranet content manager. A professional blog provides the blogger with his or her own voice and unique brand within the company. Depending on the quality of their content (organizations that adopt user-generated content must first address issue of content credibility), various bloggers will become recognized experts in their given fields through their posts. They will have a personal stake in the system and will be more likely to go that extra mile to ensure the intranet succeeds. This has the potential of increases both the volume and frequency of content on your intranet.

Use low-cost viral marketing

It would be ideal to schedule targeted training sessions to educate users on how to get the most of out of the system, circulate hardcopy brochures and Flash-based advertisements to all employees, strategically position professionally designed posters of the intranet in high traffic areas, but management might see these promotional activities as unjustifiable expenses. Your goal is to gain users' attention without dipping your hands into management's cookie jar. This will garner too much unwanted attention from the wrong people.

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