Social enterprise tools - keep it simple, stupid

Ahead of a roundtable at Salesforce.com's Cloudforce event that I'm taking part in later this week, I was thinking about some of the enterprise collaboration tools I've used in the past.  My previous employer used Lotus Notes and I remember it as an awful system that was clunky, slow, difficult to navigate around and virtually unusable offsite.  I daresay it has improved since those days (I certainly hope so for the sake of its users).  Other intranets and content management systems I've used at other organisations have been equally bad.  

One of the main problems was their complexity and the usability barriers that made it difficult to upload and then find the information you needed to do your job.  One of the reasons that Google has been so successful, apart from the excellent search results it serves up, is its simple interface.  The user has to do the minimum amount of work while the system does the complicated stuff in the background. 

Euan Semple sums it up nicely in this extract from a recent blog post:

"This is for me the biggest difference between truly social tools and many of the enterprise tools that go under that name. Tools that work are simple to use, but have complex and rich effects and require an investment of thought and effort to make them truly effective. Tools that don't work are complicated, difficult to work out but make it easy to write inconsequential flotsam."