I am working on the white paper about developing a platform for the virtual community of practice. I have decided to focus on organizations of higher learning, colleges and universities. I expect that things are different when a company like IBM invests in developing a new platform interface for their employees vs. a community college decides to support faculty and staff's professional development and learning or its professional learning community .  Companies do invest in social intranet or move from the static intranet platform to social. According to the Social Intranet Study, conducted in 2011 by Prescient Digital Media (consulting firm), the many leading technology organizations (IBM, Cisco, and Verizon to name a few) were pioneers in developing such platforms.

Now, when social intranet platforms have market value, companies like Cisco & Microsoft  are selling them. Since these commercial platforms do not have open architecture, it is not easy to customize them to the needs of a particular community of practice or add modules or another application. I am looking for the social intranet platform that allows to introduce complimentary products.

.