"We have 12,000 employees and the knowledge is so widespread," says Karen Lee, senior director of internal communications. Lee was the point-person for implementing a solution for SAS. "We needed something that brought communication channels together--one place that would reference a lot of our communications."

Lee says discussions about what was next in communications prompted their interest in an enterprise collaboration platform. SAS was using Chatter, an organically created microblog, but the tool was mostly used mostly by employees who belonged to the research and development team. So, acknowledging their increasing population of millennials in the workplace, Lee says they investigated the services and tools this group of employees was currently using.

"They all were using sites like Facebook and Linkedin, and they were all very comfortable with smartphones," she says. "Looking at how they were communicating, I said, 'You know what? I want something like Facebook.'"

Becky Graebe, manager of internal communications, who worked closely with Lee during their search and implementation of an enterprise collaboration tool, says that when they discovered that millennials were turning to social networks like Facebook to communicate, they realized the need for a platform was more urgent than they first thought.