Social Business, Social Enterprise News, Analysis

Not long ago, a spark ignited inside a dystopian society, and the people staged a revolution against the oppressive, all-powerful leadership. But when the revolution failed, the leaders punished the people for their bold actions, instituting harsh policies that sent all but a few into a state of fear and despair.

Many companies have already embarked on their social enterprise journey but are realizing that past that first stage of experimentation and initial adoption challenges still persist.

With information management reaching a crisis point in many enterprises as more and more channels pump data into disparate silos, an unlikely champion for breaking down content silos has arisen in the shape of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) strategies.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Will the Microsoft of a few years from now resemble today’s model? New reports suggest that changes are underway. 

“Relevant” and “context” are two terms one often hears in discussions about social collaboration. It’s usually built into phrases such as, “We make social collaboration relevant by placing it in user context.” Context is a nice idea that has yet to be fully implemented in software. That’s too bad since context is the final part of the machinery that will get the social collaboration engine moving at top speed.

For some regulated industries like finance, social business can become a social headache. To lessen that headache, Actiance’s Vantage flagship product for compliance management of all social business channels provides audits, content inspection and archiving, and now the company is out with its 2013 version. 

If you are trying to find the best social business tool for your organization or simply looking to glean best practices and insights from those who have been there, there was a lot to learn from our recent webinar: How Social Business Tools are Accelerating Sales and Marketing. Read on for the webinar summary and the full event recording.

Social business has the potential to change the way we work, but for the most part it has not. The social enterprise is not yet here, though many talk about it, and confuse it with using social tools. For that, we can blame management. 

Office 365 has been gaining momentum. Last week Office 365 Home Premium Edition passed the 1 million subscription mark. Before that it was reported that one in five of Microsoft’s enterprise customers have now subscribed to Office 365, up from one in seven a year ago. With more companies embracing Office 365, IT departments are likely to face additional challenges of deploying, supporting and managing access to cloud hosted versions of Office's server platforms. Enter Centrify for Office 365.

This week our contributors finished off our month long focus on customer journeys with a look at the value of irrational employees for customer journeys and gave us a glimpse of the bright future of marketing. They questioned the obsession with innovative culture and discussed the features of the now widely available SkyDrive Pro.

Employees, being wonderful, irrational, social, purpose-driven creatures, are your most important weapon in connecting with and delighting the equally irrational customers you hope to convert to loyal advocates.

As the workplace gets more digital and mobile, the need to create more mobile friendly tools is apparent. One application that is being developed to fit this demand is CoTap, a workplace mobile messaging service.

Given that IBM is currently devising a restructuring plan that will involve cutting thousands of jobs worldwide, the announcement that it is launching new big data and analytics services to help manage workforces is just a little bit ironic.

Salesforce has given us another tiny peak into its upcoming Communities release, this time announcing a product called Company Communities, customizable intranets that are mobile ready and can integrate with other apps.

Zoho the creator of productivity, collaboration and business applications has launched a new social network: Zoho Pulse, which is designed to improve collaboration and communication throughout an organization.