If employee portals and corporate intranets are to be exploited to the full, they need to become as important a bookmark to the employee as CricInfo is to the cricket fan or ft.com to the share trader. After all, we know from the dotcom crash of last year that it isn't enough to put a website up and expect people to use it.

And much like a B2C website, B2E sites must offer compelling content.

Global IT services company Wipro believes it has come up with a successful formula by incorporating a fun element into its portal, Channel W, which aims to be the single window through which its 9,500 "Wiproites", spread across more than 10 countries (with headquarters in India), can interact and bond with each other.

"We were redesigning our intranet and realised what we had was rather flat. We wanted something that would mean that employees went to it of their own volition," says George Joseph, manager of talent engagement and development at Wipro.

The average age of Wipro employees is 26 and they are, typically, "talented and fun-loving", spending most of their time in front of the computer. With this in mind, Channel W has been designed to look more like a youth portal and, in addition to self-service HR tools and a knowledge management system, staff can use it to organise their social lives, buy and sell items and set up interest groups.

Feedback is encouraging, with the majority of areas actively used. The buy and sell section, for instance, is heavily populated because of all the relocation going on within the company. "I've just moved to London from India and used it to dispose of some of my possessions," says Joseph. "You can sell whatever you like, and it doesn't need administrating because the buyers and sellers interact directly."

As well as helping to sort his home life out, the self-service HR side of the portal has immeasurably helped in his working life too, says Joseph. "It has let me concentrate on the more value-added and forward-thinking areas of HR."

Those working on projects together can also brainstorm online and it give employees on the shopfloor a chance to have a direct line to senior personnel.

The serious side to the portal is its role as a corporate communications device and as a hub for the company's collective knowledge. As a knowledge-intensive company, which is growing at a rapid pace, it knows it must use the technology to manage and share this knowledge. As Vivek Paul, Vice Chairman, Wipro Limited, explains, "Managing our intellectual capital efficiently has become one of the most critical factors that will help create business value and provide competitive advantage for Wipro as an organisation. Channel W is a vehicle to achieve this."

Wipro has also opened the portal up to clients to act as a showcase for the creativity in the company and this has led to customers expressing an interest in having one of their own.

But they don't come cheap: the cost of developing a full-functionality portal like Channel W is $3-5m, while a scaled down version would cost about $1m.

"When we delivered Channel W, we did not do it with the intention of having a saleable product," explains Paul.

"Sometimes you do something that you think is smart for yourself and realise it can be sold to others."