Top 10: Intranet Portals and Social Software for Eastern Europe

American company Progress Software has acquired the social intranet system Citrix Podio (and ShareFile) for $875 million. Podio is used by thousands of organizations worldwide. The system offers a no-code platform for setting up business processes and collaborative spaces, mobile apps for iOS and Android, advanced automation using "if this, then that" rules, and scalable permissions to increase productivity and reduce tool fragmentation. Podio was founded in Denmark in 2009. In 2012, Citrix Systems acquired Podio to expand its portfolio of cloud collaboration and social business tools, integrating it into the broader Citrix ecosystem of virtual workspaces and remote work solutions. In 2022, Citrix merged with TIBCO Software to form Cloud Software Group (which was the seller in this deal).

In a decision that seemed both inevitable and mildly perplexing—rather like the discovery that your towel has mysteriously disappeared from a perfectly ordinary pocket dimension—Meta has decided to bid farewell to Facebook Workplace, its plucky little business communication platform. The company, with the sort of optimism usually reserved for the moments before a disaster-prone starship launch, is now pivoting towards the infinitely buzzier realms of AI and the metaverse, which it insists will revolutionize work as we know it. Workplace will keep its lights on until September 2025, but for those feeling abandoned, Meta recommends embracing the newly Zoom-acquired Workvivo as a replacement—though, admittedly, Workplace’s revenues were never going to rival the ad-fueled billions from Facebook and Instagram. Still, it was a useful reminder that Meta's ambitions stretch far beyond cat memes and oversharing.

Microsoft announced new collaboration capabilities between the Copilot AI assistant for Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Viva intranet to improve the employee experience. Copilot will work with Viva data and applications as a unified interface, providing employees, managers, and HR leaders with insights and self-service capabilities, such as visualizing team health, identifying new priorities with OKRs, or upskilling for career advancement. The Microsoft Copilot dashboard powered by Viva will show how many employees have access to and can take advantage of Copilot powered by Microsoft 365, customize Copilot use across applications, and provide early signals about Copilot's impact on team productivity based on meeting, chat, email and document statistics.

Zoom has acquired Workvivo, an Irish startup developing an internal communications and corporate culture platform of the same name. Unlike Zoom itself, Workvivo is focused on asynchronous collaboration and is designed not for specific projects, but for increasing employee engagement across the company. Features include an activity feed, employee directory, surveys, and a modern forum. In its announcement, Zoom noted that businesses "need to think differently to retain talent and build a strong corporate culture. Employee engagement and building culture through communication are no longer a nice-to-have add-on—they are essential for success in today's business environment."

Microsoft confirmed that it is finally shutting down Yammer, the enterprise social network it acquired over a decade ago for $1.2B. Despite Microsoft's best efforts to promote Yammer by integrating it into its core Office suite of products, it never gained much traction. Many of the product's users, who relied on it for communications, eventually migrated to Microsoft Teams, which the company integrated with Yammer in 2019. Two years ago, Microsoft launched Viva, billed as an "employee training platform," which later evolved into something of a corporate intranet. Microsoft has been actively developing Viva over the past few months, and last year launched Viva Engage, a module that the developers describe as an "evolution of the Yammer app."