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Great ideas can come from anywhere, and the latest version of the versatile intranet solution ThoughtFarmer aims to help you capture them.

The company has built several impressive improvements into newly released ThoughtFarmer 3.5, but the one getting the most attention is e-mail discussion capturing. The idea actually came from IDEO, a well-known design firm and a ThoughtFarmer customer. IDEO creates e-mail distribution lists for new projects, but found that many ideas from the e-mail discussions weren't being saved.

For a solution, IDEO and ThoughtFarmer worked together to create a method for capturing e-mail discussions. Rather than being lost in in-boxes, those ideas could then be automatically archived and made available to other people in the company. The system works best for companies using Microsoft Exchange, says Chris McGrath, ThoughtFarmer's co-creator and product evangelist, since they can manage their list membership directly. It works with any mail system, however.

A major release nine months in the making, version 3.5 has a lot more going for it. For starters, it's "way faster," says McGrath. The previous version used Microsoft SQL cache dependencies and wasn't managing the server-side cache effectively. The program now uses manual cache flushing, which is faster. Version 3.5 was also written with client-side cache improvements, so that a 500k page is now only a 50k download because of cached content.

Also helping the speed, ThoughtFarmer now ships with an OEM Gzip utility, so that text can be sent zipped, then uncompressed by the browser. It's an underused performance optimization feature, says McGrath.

Intranet users will appreciate the overhauled employee directory, which offers a filtered search. It's now easier to visually browse the directory and to narrow down results, says McGrath.

Many of the improvements relate to design. ThroughtFarmer customers often work in fields were design is central, says McGrath, such as EA Games, eHarmony, and IDEO, as well as several architecture and engineering firms. The revised software now has a cleaner, neater look, he says.

A tree-view navigation system has also been added, offering a Windows Explorer-like way of drilling down into sections for quick navigation. Users click triangles to expand or collapse a navigation section.

The ThoughtFarmer Core

For those new to ThoughtFarmer, it lets you create a new intranet quickly with an emphasis on social features.

"It's everything you've always needed in an intranet-news items, a place to put your policy documents, a search engine, an employee directory-and then on top of that it's got social features like blogs and feeds and wikis and social networks, all things that make it good for strengthening workplace community, and yet you can still use it for deploying a global intranet," says McGrath.

Target customers are mid-size companies with between 500 and 2,000 employees, says McGrath, and ThoughtFarmer deployments are typically fast. For eHarmony, he says, his team installed the software on Monday, completed an audit and information architecture assessment on Tuesday, migrated data on Wednesday, conducted hands-on training on Thursday, and by Friday the intranet was in active use.

The price of ThoughtFarmer is $109 per user, with volume discounts. There's also a yearly software maintenance fee of 35 percent after the first year. For more information, visit the ThoughtFarmer site and request a demo from a salesperson.

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