Content Management Matters ™

Trampoline Systems provides social networking solutions to enterprises, so it should be no surprise that they were hanging out at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and the Web 2.0 strategies event in London. While at these events, they took the time to survey over 111 delegates on their use or planned use of social networking technologies. The results? Well, not really surprising. The question is, were all the right questions asked?

If you can't get enough of social networking -- and clearly we can't -- make sure and pencil in the 4th annual Social Networking Conference taking place July 10-11 in San Francisco. The San Francisco chapter will focus on my favorite topic, enterprise social networking and on mobile social networking. The keynote speaker will be Britt Selvitelle of Twitter, who's talk, cleverly entitled "What's Love Got To Do With It?" will touch on why it's not enough to make passionate users, but also "passionate creators" (a reference to Twitter's wildly popular API, no doubt).

The very last panel I attended at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was also one that I had the privilege of moderating. Our topic was the big hot topic of the conference: how to integrate social networking features into the enterprise and whether or not they can co-exist happily with a content management system. Specifically in our panel's case, we talked about Facebook's utility. The net takeaway from our panel was -- it's all about the platform; Facebook matters because of its ability to integrate outside applications.

It’s well known that Microsoft relies heavily on partners to help develop extensions or integrations to their software. That doesn’t mean however, that they sit back and wait for the cool tools to come to them. Such is the case with social networking. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week they demoed a social networking solution they had been testing internally called TownSquare.

NewsGator Technologies was one of the nine companies who announced product integrations with Microsoft SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. For these guys though it wasn’t “breaking” news, as they have been talking about the latest version of Social Sites for a few months now.

Micro-blogging is getting a bit of a lift today as Six Apart announces a new application – well, new to the iPhone at least. Six Apart’s BlogIt application for Facebook is now available for the Apple iPhone. Is this just the beginning of a long line of applications that will propel us forever into the world of twitter-dom?

Most of the integration news we hear about SharePoint relates to the creation of internal, employee focused solutions. Here's one that flips that around and focuses on SharePoint as an external solution. Awareness, a provider of social media solutions, has integrated their product with SharePoint -- both WSS3.0 and MOSS -- to provide Web 2.0 communities capabilities inside the SharePoint world.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference has kicked into full swing and Microsoft seems to plan on taking center stage. They have already laid out a number of new announcements that give it's flagship content management system SharePoint an overflow of social networking options.

It was just a year ago that Facebook elevated their college kids only social networking site from a classier MySpace to a web portal in training with their release of Facebook Platform. Now, the buzz on the blogosphere according to TechCrunch and Facebook news blog, AllFacebook, is on how Facebook is working on an "open source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications."

At the EMC World conference in Vegas, EMC unveiled their latest plans and roadmap for content management and collaboration including tighter integration of new products with the Documentum platform and a new SaaS model designed for SMBs. It sounds like a very busy year ahead for these folks, almost too busy.

San Francisco based micro-blogging site Twitter has managed to secure US $15 million dollars in VC funding as reported by tech blog GigaOm, leaving them with a valuation of US $80 million dollars. This comes at an interesting time for the site, which has spent the past few days in a constant struggle to stay up and running.

The more web 2.0 progresses and the more the term web 3.0 shows up the more it seems like social networking is becoming a must for anyone involved in social media at all. Every week and nearly every day the big guns in the social world are releasing new and innovative ways to connect the web, and therefore the world. Facebook is no exception to this rule.

It was late January when Systems Alliance released version 4 of their web content management suite SiteExecutive. At the time, we noted the lack of the social networking capabilities.

Well, they were either listening very closely to us or to their own customers because only three months later they have announced their Enhancement Pack 1 for SiteExecutive 4.1 - and it looks packed with "facebook for the enterprise" like features -- well sort of.

The Swedish company Episerver, one of the world’s fastest growing providers of Web Content Management (WCM) platforms, has made the strategic investment of acquiring Netstar, enabling Episerver to offer its clients a Web Content Management solution with an integrated community component.

IBM is not the only ECM vendor looking to leverage social networking capabilities in their applications. Looks like Oracle is getting into the game as well. In this case, it's a mix of CRM and social networking in an On Demand solution.

Sounds a little like salesforce.com's new Spring 08 release to me.