Motorola revved internal communication and collaboration by providing its 69,000 employees in 70 countries as well as 9,200 external partners with Web 2.0 tools to publish, maintain, and share content. Intranet 2.0, as Motorola calls the effort, includes bookmarking and tagging that lets users share knowledge company-wide. It provides social search technology that improves the quality of searches by injecting results that other users found most valuable. The company has RSS-enabled its entire knowledge repository, letting employees subscribe to content related to their work.

A whopping 92% of employees are using the tools. The company has 38 Tbytes of data in the system, including 5,400 blogs, 4,500 wikis, 65,000 social bookmarks, and 30 million shared documents. Its people add 90,000 documents a day.

Who wouldn't want on-call focus groups? That's what Southwest Airlines got when it took off into the blogosphere last year with its Nuts About Southwest blog as a place to develop a rapport with customers.

Employees use the blog to talk about what's going on at Southwest, giving customers an inside look at the airline. Customers respond, ask questions, and describe their experiences with the airline

and elsewhere. USS Blog Boy, for example, is on the sixth installment of his Deployment Diary, describing life on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

Discussions can morph into virtual focus groups, providing on-the-spot feedback. Case in point: When CEO Gary Kelly wrote a blog about the possibility of Southwest providing seat assignments on its planes as an alternative to its open seating approach, customers had a lot to say, and blog comments surged to their highest level ever.

At Accenture, customized microsites are improving communication with customers and driving sales. Working with the Internet marketing group, Accenture's IT group developed an infrastructure that lets teams of employees who work with customers launch microsites that serve as virtual platforms for sharing information with customers.

Using customizable templates, these teams generate content-rich, updatable microsites where information is shared in forums, discussion boards, downloadable content, podcasts, video streams, Flash animation, surveys, and collaborative work environments. The microsites have deepened existing client relationships by improving collaboration and efficiency, and they've also proved to be a good way to engage prospective clients by delivering highly tailored messages, while demonstrating a team-oriented approach with clients. Accenture expects to launch about 80 microsites this year and several hundred more over the next three years.

Until recently, Baylor Health Care System's Physician Portal could only be used by Baylor doctors to retrieve information. If they wanted to order procedures for patients, they had to pick up the phone. That changed with a recent electronic workflow project that lets non-Baylor physicians refer patients to Baylor's facilities and give them access to their patients' electronic medical records. This is important to physicians who don't have admitting privileges but want to remain informed about the course of treatment for their patients. The portal also was changed into a two-way communication tool--so physicians can order procedures for patients from various units in Baylor's hospitals and other facilities.

The project improved the quality of care by helping patients get procedures scheduled faster and letting physicians access critical information for more informed and timely decisions.