1. Simple to use and work within existing tools or workflow. Sales people don't want yet another tool to use. They should be able to get the information they need from within the tools they already use – for some that will be email, others may be prolific mobile users, some may spend most of their day within their CRM application or portal. Just don't make them go somewhere else to get what they need.

2. Ability to distinguish and manage opinion and ideas distinctly from authenticated information. There are a lot of topics where idea generation and crowd sourcing are great and provide fantastic “feet on the street” insight into what is going on in an industry or with a competitor. But there are also topics for which a large company has a legal responsibility (and potential liability) regarding what is communicated. Questions about pricing and legal terms typically need to be answered by an authority – not a sales rep with 6 months tenure. Some industries even have restrictions on how products or services can be described. So the ability to distinguish, provide different workflow, and manage these vastly different types of content is very important.

And now I have to add a shameless plug since you asked for other utilities….our application StreetSmarts has been providing these capabilities for large corporate clients for over 5 years. StreetSmarts unifies knowledge management, collaboration, document management, and enterprise social networking into a single business application leveraging internal and external sources of information.