As companies have seen the massive adoption of social technologies by consumers and are looking at ways to leverage such tools in the corporate environment, many new and existing vendors are trying to establish themselves in, and capitalize on, the young and growing enterprise social software market. But with so many tools available, it can be hard to make the right choices for your business. While consumers can pick up and discard social tools at will, businesses need to be much more careful, as implementing the wrong tool could be costly.
What factors should you consider when selecting an enterprise social media tool for your business? According to the comprehensive new GigaOM Pro report, “Social Media in the Enterprise” (subscription required), you should: Read the rest of this entry »
Back in October, I had the pleasure of attending O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo Europe, at the Berliner Congress Centre in the heart of East Berlin. One of the more interesting conversations I had was with Jeffrey Walker and Laura Khalil of Atlassian, creators of the Confluence enterprise wiki software.
In describing the company and product’s history, Walker and Khalil indicated a corporate culture that was very much based around the notion of web working. While this isn’t completely unheard of for a large corporate, web working is a style that’s more closely associated with freelancers, startups and smaller organisations.
Khalil pointed me to a post on the company’s blog that discusses some of the cultural and technological adjustments the organisation has made as it needed to manage offices in Sydney and San Francisco:
- Internal communication is oriented around the Confluence wiki product: bringing together product management, HR, marketing, business metrics, template emails and PR.
- Task and project management, such as customer requests and bug reports, are tracked and managed using the company’s own JIRA product.
- Email is discouraged as a collaboration tool, being displaced by Confluence and JIRA, but still employed for 1-to-1 and “broadcast” communication.
- Lightweight tools such as Flickr and, notably, Delicious bring other collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities.
Interestingly, the company’s internal and external blog authors number around 160: an extraordinarily high figure for a 200-person company, with 80 percent of its staff publishing and sharing their work.
Also at the Web 2.0 Expo, I ran into Rodrigo Vaca, Zoho’s director of marketing, responsible for leading efforts to promote the popular web-based office suite.
Like Atlassian, Zoho’s solution to geographically distributed staff in many different timezones is to employ its own products and services as a component of the company’s culture. More so perhaps, with a thousand staff in offices from India and the U.S. to Japan and China, the web-based foundation of the company is critical. Vaca related how even the company’s COO works from home in order to minimize time wasted in physically commuting.
What both Atlassian and Zoho’s utilization of web working indicate is that it’s a working pattern that’s very much suited to large, mainstream, multinational organization – something we discussed a while back in Telecommuting Trends and our coverage of the emergence of Smart Work Centres.
Read more about Atlassian’s web worker culture and tools in An Insiders Look: Part 1 of 2 on how we (Atlassian) collaborate.
Last week I wrote an article about Liferay, an open source portal app. Today, I’ll be looking at another option, Cyn.in, from Cynapse, an enterprise software solution provider.
Cyn.in is an open source collaboration app, and as such only offers a portion of the functionality of Liferay, but those looking for a more pure collaboration platform, and not a full-fledged intranet, may find it more tailored to their specific needs.
Cyn.in is centralized software that collects all of your basic collaboration software, like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, etc. It also supports file sharing and repositories. I tried the live demo to get a sense of what Cyn.in has to offer, with a special focus on how it might compare to Liferay regarding my specific goal of using it to help organize and grow my collaborative writing blog.
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If you’re looking for a more complete, customized end-to-end solution than something like Google Apps can offer for your business, you may want to take a look at what Liferay’s offering. The company offers portal, content management system, and collaboration solutions, all customizable, open source software to fit yours or a client’s specific needs.
It’s designed to require little setup, and aimed at companies with little or no in-house development capability. Out of the box, Liferay offers a number of different pre-set portlet configuration options, including CMS and collaboration. The idea is that you get an easy-to-set up intranet system up and running in no time, with features that can be easily changed, added, and removed without much effort.
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Those of us with @gmail.com email addresses or an email account through Google Apps have had some fun playing with the new experimental features through Gmail Labs. From the silly Mail Goggles to the more helpful ability to add a calendar to the sidebar or set an end date on vacation reminders, the Labs-in-email thing has mostly been aimed at the everyday user.
Now Google is getting serious by bringing the Labs concept to Google Apps. They’re starting with just 3 Labs add-ins. Google says they’re hoping 3rd party developers will get involved. Unlike the email Labs, these features must be added by your Google Apps Administrator. Usefulness depends on your organization/company needs. And remember, Google uses the “experimental” label to mean “use at your own risk.”
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WWD readers are likely familiar with the notion of coworking – low cost collaboration & community space for digital workers – pioneered by the likes of San Francisco’s Hat Factory and Citizen Space. With coworking communities springing up across the globe, the phenomenon is beginning to morph into a new forms to suit the working patterns of web workers, freelancers and mobile employees everywhere…
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
