Social Software News & Articles

The landscape for social platforms is a rich one, and IT professionals are using a number of approaches to deploy social communication and collaboration features in an enterprise environment.

The social enterprise has the potential to transform the business landscape. New ways of communicating and collaborating are helping to break down the barriers between functional silos and geography. The end result will be more agile businesses fueled by better decision making and more efficient processes.

First the backstory

A cloud of confusion fell upon Documentum enthusiasts last month when EMC Information Infrastructure Products President Pat Gelsinger told UK Technology journal v3 that EMC would be focusing its strategy on Cloud and Big Data rather than Social and Mobile.

As mentioned in yesterday's article, there are two critical considerations for businesses trying to transform into social businesses. We already looked at the business processes that can act as the foundation of a social business. With this article we will explore the technology that drives the change.

While we might expect social within the enterprise to be easy as Facebook or Twitter, it’s not.  Deploying social technology within the enterprise is a journey filled with organizational hurdles that include compliance, security, culture change, executive sponsorship, budget and integration challenges to name just a few.  In some organizations, this social journey begins when the business wants to embrace social before corporate IT is ready.

The success of Moxie Software's social business platform is further proof that it's important to provide the right tools for both the employee and the customer to engage, share and work together.

IBM Connections is getting a major overhaul and it looks like the last two years of hard work by IBM has taken the social collaboration platform to a whole new level.

Avoiding the trough of disillusionment beyond the peak of inflated expectations*

So your enterprise jumped on to the bandwagon of enterprise social software in 2011 with the hopes of fostering new innovations, breaking down organizational silos and establishing a sense of social communication for your geographically distributed staff. Predictably, a large number of people signed up in the first few weeks, a few enthusiastic ones posted blogs, formed communities around domain and business, a senior business leader perhaps even attempted to make this the mainstream platform for her organizational change process. However, as the year draws to an end, the over enthusiasm of a few lighthouses seems to be tapering off, user adoption has slowed down, people are getting back to old ways of working. In summary, the trough of disillusionment is not very far if corrective actions are not taken.

IBM has already staked its claim in the mobile arena with a number of social apps for the smartphone. And while these apps work just fine on the tablet, they don't take advantage of the UI and unique capabilities tablets offer. Which is why IBM has introduced tablet versions of their mobile apps. Here's what is on tap.

We are all overwhelmed with content on a daily basis. Our feeds blink in and out of our peripheral vision, our 7 communication streams ping and honk and shout for attention, our searches result in 600,000,000 results. How we prioritize this information stream and glean insight and relevance from the flood is an ongoing evolving process. The wisdom of the crowd is here to help.

With its "integrate everything" Universal Web App (UWA) technology based on open standards, and Host your own Social Analytics giving the enterprise control, Netvibes announced the latest version of its namesake enterprise platform already adopted by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies including the US Dept. of Energy (US DoE).

If you liked that F1 button that MindTouch came up with back in July and you're a big desktop publishing fan, then you might like the latest announcement which essentially combines the two.

Just in time for DrupalCon London 2011, Acquia, provider of Drupal Web CMS services, has announced the release of several new components to its Acquia Network offering. The general theme is helping developers manage and scale their Drupal-powered websites more easily. The package consists of a new dashboard, site-testing tools, training modules and more.

Acquia (news, site), provider of Drupal services and support has announced that it is introducing two new Drupal service offerings and that it has acquired two companies.

In my last post, I talked about some of the ways that the iPad and social business software (SBS) both had tremendous opportunities to outflank Microsoft's dominance in the desktop document creation and document management space, respectively. Based on the responses to the article, it seems like lots of folks out there are wondering the same things about Microsoft's ability to maintain their dominance in these areas.

But, like any consultant worth their salt, I like to have it both ways, so in this post I want to consider the very real ways that Apple and SBS vendors could fail in their attempts to knock Microsoft out of the game, because their long-term success is far from assured.