Enterprise Collaboration News, Reviews

Mindjet has rolled its most powerful products into one comprehensive solution for growing businesses.

Forrester Research refers to social activities streams which connect enterprise social tools to adjacent collaboration, content, portal, and productivity applications in the environment as a “bridge” to “socially enabled” enterprise applications. Evaluating leading vendors in the current activities stream marketplace, Forrester has placed Yammer, Salesforce and Tibco at the head of the list, with VMware (Socialcast) and Neudesic cited as “strong performers".

The Intranet is dead! Long live the Intranet! ...so the refrain goes.

The promise of the Intranet was that it was going to liberate content and spread the wealth locked inside information repositories, closed networks, siloed file systems and even physical file cabinets. In many ways Intranets -- when done well -- have improved life behind the firewall.

However, we are far from the holy grail.

A Forrester Research survey found that just 43% of enterprise employees access an intranet every day. Worse, 35% don’t even use their intranet on a monthly basis.

The fact is that Intranet promises have not been fully realized, and this is exactly where the power of social comes in.

Social Intranets - The Promise

Social Business technology supplies the essential functionality missing from conventional intranets and turns them into the dynamic collaborative environments known as social intranets.

The promise of Social Intranets is to build on the successes of the original Intranet vision, but add these benefits:

• Open up content creation and curation to the full enterprise, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd
• Break down the walls between people, groups and departments via tools as simple as the @joesmith reference.
• Utilize internal social graph intelligence to enhance the relevancy of the intranet experience, improve search results and reduce the time to task completion
• Efficiently capture ideas and harness the innate innovation found in your workforce, leading to a more robust and streamlined ideation process

To learn more about how these benefits are being realized in practice, you can join the upcoming social intranet panel discussion on May 30th (live and online).

Infographic -- The Benefits of a Social Intranet

Join the Social Intranet Best Practices Panel Discusion

On May 30th you can join in for a live, online panel discussion focused on current trends and best practices for designing, implementing and succeeding with a Social Intranet.

Panel members include:

• Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group will discuss at a high level, the latest industry research and trends on how leading companies are revamping dusty, soul-sucking intranets, and giving employees a social, collaborative, engaging experience that drives productivity, fosters innovation, and yields staggering results.
• Tyson Cornell of PricewaterhouseCoopers will dig a level deeper, into the strategies and processes that global enterprises are using to deploy Social Business Software -- both to drive business transformation, and to add value to existing communication and information infrastructures.
• Tiffany LaBanca and Kristen Ritter of News Corporation will round out the panel, sharing a case study of how their company is becoming a social-powered organization. News Corporation's OurNews Social Business Network is changing the way the company communicates, collaborates, and innovates -- connecting more than 50 businesses and 15,000 employees on a unified global platform.

If social intranet success is your curiosity or mandate, sign-up for the online panel discussion here. 

This article was sponsored by Jive Software.

Creating great mobile experiences is our focus this month. While it's one of the most discussed topics for external web experience strategies, it's also something we need to consider for our employees and partners. To guide some of your thinking consider these discussions:

For the internal customer:

• The Dark Side of Mobile
• What is Really Driving Mobile in the Enterprise?

For the external customer:

• Why You Need a Mobile E-Commerce Strategy Now
• Mobile CXM: How to Leverage Mobile Solutions to Meet Customer Experience Expectations

Also this week, we checked out the new DAM Maturity Matrix and some cool vendors in content management and enterprise collaboration.

Most Popular

• SharePoint 15: 8 Things to Help You Prepare
• The Real Reason Why Intranets Aren't Working
• Facebook Acquires Glancee: Now Everywhere You Go, There's Someone You Sort of Know
• Gartner's Cool Social CRM Vendors Feed Information Into Business Processes
• Using SharePoint to Communicate Organizational Structure Effectively

Editor's Picks

• UX is Destroying the World! Will UX Come to the Rescue?
• The Dark Side of Mobile
• Plone Open Source CMS Project to Adopt HTML5, CSS3
• Gartner's Cool Vendors in Collaboration, Social Software: harmon.ie, MangoApps Listed
• Providing Exceptional Customer Service Through Social Media

Around the Web

• 3 Lenses For Innovation
• Social Business: Where It's Been & Where It's Going
• Three Things They Don’t Tell You About Community Management
• Social Business In The B2B Ecosystem
• Pinterest: Top 100 Digital Marketing Boards

Featured Events (all events | post your event)

• May 17 -- Web Experience Management Lunch Seminar in Boston
• May 30 -- (Webinar) How to Drive Innovation, Productivity with a Social Intranet
• Jun 03 -- Semantic Technology & Business Conference San Francisco
• Jun 18 -- Enterprise 2.0 Summit Boston
• Jun 26 -- Forrester's Customer Experience Forum New York

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post your job)

• Senior Digital Content Strategist in Virginia at Siteworx
• Director of Product Marketing in Palo Alto at Kapow Software
• Executive Editor -- Technology in San Francisco at IGN Entertainment
• Software Project Manager in Wisconsin at Widen
• IT Business Applications Analyst in Massachussetts at Autonomy

We’ve been saving up "Gartner’s Cool Vendor’s in Content Management" list for the past four days like a kid trying not to eat their favorite candy bar. Finally, we snapped, opened it last night and found that only four vendor’s had made this year’s list.

It may be hard to imagine an ultrahip jazz maestro like the late Miles Davis immersing himself in the world of social software and collaboration, but according to a new report from Gartner, some pretty cool things are happening in this space. In "Cool Vendors in Social Software and Collaboration", Gartner identifies harmon.ie, MangoApps, Podio, Social Intelligence, and SocialLogix as being among a "broader set of interesting vendors to watch in social software and collaboration".

GageIn, a relative newcomer in the enterprise collaboration space, has debuted a new feature called News Portals, and it strives to make curating business content as easy as sharing a favorite landscape photo on Pinterest.

Jive Software adds a couple of new features to its Social Business Platform today. It's about what matters and working anywhere. Oh, and there's a free trial in there as well.

LinkedIn has added an iPad app to go along with newly redesigned iPhone and Android apps. LinkedIn waited even longer than Facebook to finally release an iPad app, but the result is a polished new look for the powerful professional networking tool.

Atlassian's Confluence collaboration platform picked up a nifty new tool today with the announcement of iRise visualization technology integration.

Earlier this month we pointed out that Yammer has moved past basic social networking and into primary productivity tool territory. But that news was nothing compared to its latest announcement -- universal search.

There you are at the office, deftly switching between sending status updates, uploading documents, commenting on projects and responding to emails. You collaborate! You engage! You’re the epitome of Social Business! And yet, you feel no more connected to colleagues or consumers than you did before, and productivity is still crawling. It’s an increasingly common circumstance that begs the question: Why can’t we figure this out?

Microsoft continues to leak information on what new features will ship with next year's major Office release, the latest being more cloud support and web-type extensions.

If you're not satisfied with your existing cloud storage facility, then why not give the beta of Cubby a go. Billed as "one giant leap for your stuff", it offers a mix of local or 5GB of cloud storage and access from browsers, iPads and other devices for easy collaboration.

Today, Yammer announces the acquisition of UK-based OneDrum, a document collaboration and file sharing company that supports Microsoft Office. It's become clear that Yammer is no-longer just another social network, it's an organization's primary productivity tool.