Enterprise Collaboration: Guidance from the Experts

A number of experts contributed to our enterprise collaboration party this week. Read on for tips on everything from how to avoid a bad implementation situation to our take on the whole Chatter vs. Yammer ordeal. 

• Enterprise Collaboration: Focus On Improving Practices. The key question is not if people have adopted a certain technology, but rather how they are using it and how new and improved practices are being adopted. For an organization that seeks to improve its operations and management, the adoption of a certain technology isn’t really interesting unless it creates value.


• Business Collaboration: Combining Open, Social & Content. Does OpenSocial have a place in the business context? Often perceived as consumer web specification, in fact OpenSocial has found a place inside enterprise collaboration. Web 2.0 underpins Enterprise 2.0. The ability of OpenSocial to present small, granular packages of content in a "gadget" makes it appealing to organizations seeking fresh approaches to business collaboration.


• Can SharePoint Automate Collaboration?. A look at how can SharePoint be used to automate a collaboration process. 


• Document Collaboration Evolves Into a Complex Powerhouse. If ever a topic were complex, it is the evolution of document collaboration. The complexity emanates from the evolution of the document itself. In fact, today when people talk of document management, an initial grounding question should be “define document." Content is perhaps a better word nowadays. Isn’t a web page a document? An email, tweet, instant message, digitized video, image file, mashup of several content sources? Today, when one speaks of a “document,” the possibilities are limitless.


• Social Collaboration at Kraft Foods: An Interview with Vinicius Da Costa. Recently I had the opportunity to have a conversation about social collaboration with Vinicius Da Costa, who is the Associate Director of Social Collaboration Solutions at Kraft Foods.


• 3 Enterprise Collaboration Failures and Lessons Learned. I can’t say that I’m aware of too many failures with enterprise collaboration implementations per say but out of the ones I am familiar with (mainly through private discussions which is why the company names and individual’s names are left out) I thought it would be interesting to explore why they failed (or at least why their first attempts failed). There’s still a lot that needs to be learned in this industry in terms of what makes a success or failure but here’s what I have gathered so far.


• Nine Steps to Improve Business Collaboration. Here are nine steps to help you improve collaboration processes in your organization.


• Going Mobile with Yammer, The Options. As CMSWire's focus this month is on enterprise collaboration, I thought it would be interesting to see how Yammer has begun to let its users collaborate on the move, with a review of its mobile offerings.


• Chatter vs. Yammer? You Miss the Point. With enterprise collaboration dominating the CMSWire charts this month we sat down with Salesforce.com EVP Alex Dayon to talk about what was key to enterprise collaboration product and project success, how enterprise social diverged from consumer social and to ask a few obvious questions about Chatter vs. Yammer and how the two social enterprise products are really different.

Alex highlighted three top priorities for enterprise social apps: security, integration and mobility. Here's a segment of our interview: