The client I am currently working for has an IT department of 20 people. Amongst those are five highly paid professionals who focus solely on web technologies (intranet, internet, B2B, EDI, etc). They have just implemented a policy blocking the use of ‘free’ email and instant messengers via the company network. Which is their perogative. The sad thing is that when you try and access one of these services you are presented with a web page that is actually a Microsoft Word document. This company spends somewhere in the region of half a million dollars a year on internet people, hardware and software licenses and they can’t even produce an html file to serve up when inappropriate requests are made via the proxy server. Oh, and they run Microsoft Proxy server on Win2k, but that is an entirely different kettle of techie fish.
The system administration team at this particular company should really read Scoble on intranets (which I got to from Mark Pilgrim’s piece about Knowledge Management)