Chat-rooms, bulletin boards
 

Am I right in thinking that it is relative quick and easy and inexpensive to acquire software to provide a simple chat-room and/or a bulletin board and bolt it into a company intranet?

In general, probably yes. It depends on what you mean by "company intranet" and "bolt into," but there are lots of products out there, both commercial and open source. What kind of stuff did you have in mind?

I am part of a very geographically separated team for one of my clients who pride themselves on the family feel of being in this team. I suggested to them that the team could do with a bulletin board and/or a chat-room to foster this team spirit still further and was told (not by the IT team) that IT were far too busy to put the necessary work in. I was just wondering how much work it would actually involve. There is actually a page on our intranet site which the team can use as a type of bulletin board, but no-one does/knows they could, and I don't have the permissions yet (error on their part), so I was jus' wonderin', really ....

What about Google chat with specific accounts for each of you?

That sort of thing. I was thinking that most of us in the team will probably have Skype, and we could set up a Skype group. The benefit being (Google or Skype) that it'd be "off the premises" so to speak, whereas if the company provide it then obviously it remains on the record within the company ... :)

These solutions are probably among the easiest to install and certainly cheap.
You can chat verbally freeing the keybord for other things. I assume that you have a good internet bandwith.

No, I have crap bandwidth :)