George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor.

Sidebar: One-step Intranet

Your intranet is for internal use, but that doesn't mean it has to be an inside job. For small and midsize companies, outsourcing may be the way to go. Enter Intranets.com, a company in suburban Boston that offers a stripped-down but serviceable version of a corporate intranet. Intranets.com does not try to match the way big multinationals use intranet technology. But it does provide a few killer apps from the Intranet world: basic calendaring, company bulletin boards, tools for managers to update employees online instead of firing a nonstop volley of email blasts. For companies like Premier Print Holdings, a Huntsville, Alabama outfit that employs 1,100, that's an appealing package -- and affordable to boot.

Affordable, but not free. In June, Intranets.com phased out a free service that had attracted a lot of attention -- and as many as 750,000 active users -- in favor of a pay version that costs roughly $5.95 per user per month. Like most free online services, the company's hope of bringing in meaningful revenue from advertising and commerce was mostly a mirage. "If something is free, people don't take it seriously," says CEO Steve Crummey.

Crummey expected about 90% of customers to walk away when the service was no longer free. So far, around 100,000 users have decided to remain as paying customers, Crummey says. As a result, Intranets.com has become a much better business. "I want to put my energy into reaching business customers that are prepared to pay for services," he says. "Getting out of the 'free' business model is the best thing that we've done. I only wish we had done it sooner."

Visit Intranets.com (www.intranets.com) on the Web.