But Vanguard Group, one of the largest U.S. mutual fund companies, with about $1.1 trillion in assets under management, has made a change in thinking about its intranet that every company should consider to improve collaboration and information sharing. Instead of being a broadcast platform to communicate messages out to employees, the intranet portal's now built around personalization, giving the company's 12,000 employees better tools to communicate with each other. Vanguard's also using the employee portal to test interactive tools that it can then apply to its client-facing Web sites.

In a nearly $10 million project, Vanguard's IT team is turning CrewNet into the main place that employees--or crew, in Vanguard's nautical parlance--go for information. In 15 minutes, an employee can customize his or her site, including access to Lotus Notes e-mail, news feeds, and a calendar.

Vanguard expects to save about $10 million a year through the effort, dubbed eVanguard, by 2009. But some of the benefits already are being realized: Employees go to one place to manage their time-off and benefits, get approvals for training and travel, and collaborate with colleagues using tools from e-mail to online workspaces for shared documents.

Heller wants to be the "antidote" to online complexity Photo by Sacha Lecca

And there's another payoff. With no retail outlets, Vanguard's Web site is by far the largest channel for customer contact, far more than telephone and mail. The company wants a site that measures up to the best of the Web, so it consciously uses its intranet as a test bed. In 2006, for example, Vanguard knew it was about a year away from wanting to use Ajax-enabled rich Internet applications for customer apps, so it experimented with them on the intranet.

"It was really R&D spending for us," CIO Paul Heller says. "If there are going to be bugs, better they be with us."

The eVanguard project's not finished. Pilots are under way to provide more useful enterprise search using Autonomy software and to deliver an "expert finder" capability to locate who in the company has what experience. But what Vanguard has done so far is an example of how companies can adapt vintage portals to make it easier for employees to collaborate and gather data, and more important, apply that approach to benefit customers.