I suggested trying out the livejournal system for communication, since that seems to be what killed us in the past (having poor communication, that is).
I got the authority to try, but the person running the server is going to be in london during the week I need to write it (this week), so it's going to be a crappy perl hack on flat files (you'll need to pay me to learn postgres;) using the main journal system, the friends list, and basic communities. This is for a purely private groupware system, it will never be publicly released.
So, if brad or whomever doesn't like me doing this, please yell away. Otherwise, allow this to be a case study for the intranet systems you talk so much about.
If it works for us, the Real Thing might work better for everyone else, ne?