Beleaguered internet firm Yahoo! surprised many on Friday when it announced an end to working from home in the company.

In a memo widely leaked by disgruntled employees, Yahoo!’s Head of HR Jackie Reses explained:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

A lot of companies are still in their phase for experimenting with what is called enterprise 2.0 or social business. For some this means to establish web 2.0 inspired tools such as blogs, wikis or unified communication solutions. For the others the approach leads to the roll-out of social software solutions that mimick popular internet services such as Twitter and Facebook. In this guest blog for Intranetizen, Philipp Rosenthal argues organisations that ignore the eminent change in business IT frequently face the reality that employees start “outsourcing” their work environment to public cloud services – simply following the basic principle of “if there’s a will, there will be a way”.

Gamification – applying game design thinking to non-game applications – has certainly been the buzzword of 2012, with some analysts predicting that by 2013 half of all business initiatives will have gamified processes. But the response from digital workplace specialists has been more muted, with many of our blog commenters finding real-life implentations underwhelming at best.

As the Enterprise Gamification Forum kicks off this week over in San Diego, we’re taking a closer look at gamification and asking if it really has a place on your intranet.

Over the last 10 years, SharePoint has grown to be the dominant platform for intranets. With the next version due out around the end of the year, it seems timely to ask if intranet managers should be pushing to embrace it, either as an upgrade or a switch from another technology.

Much is being written about the technology improvements in SharePoint 2013, but in this special guest post for Intranetizen, Sam Marshall from ClearBox Consulting takes a look at it from a business perspective and asks: are the improvements compelling enough to take on the disruption that goes with an upgrade?

Since 1995, Gartner has used the Hype Cycle Model to characterise the over-enthusiasm and subsequent disappointment that typically happens when new technologies are introduced. Every year, Gartner issue a Hype Cycle special report, showing how far along the cycle technologies have moved, helping CIOs to decide if technologies are worth investing in yet.

Their 2012 report, published recently, shows that over the past year big data, 3D printing, activity streams, Internet TV, Near Field Communication (NFC) payment, cloud computing and media tablets have moved quickly through the cycle, and are expected to reach the ‘plateau of productivity’ – the point where benefits are widely demonstrated and accepted – in just a few years.