The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Platform to Measure the Evolution of a New Market

This was the third time that Connectbeam sponsored the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It was yet another great show with so much to learn and explore. The most amazing thing was to see how the market has evolved over the last three years. Not trying to say we’ve reached the tipping point in the Enterprise 2.0 market by any means, but it was clear that companies are moving forward and trying to find ways to apply Enterprise 2.0 technologies and principals to better address current collaboration needs.

 

In June of 2007, Connectbeam sponsored the first Enterprise 2.0 show. Our demonstrations at the show centered on the ability to bookmark and tag the information people were finding using Google and other internet search engines.  We also demonstrated our first interface into the Google GSA.  People were widely interested in our solution, with the majority of discussions centered on understanding “What is Enterprise 2.0 really?” 

 

At the Enterprise 2.0 show in 2008, we launched our initial Centralized Tag Repository solution – now known as the Social Activity Repository.  We worked with a very large networking company in the development of the new capabilities, and our demonstration centered around the ability to automatically capture tags (labels) as they were being created in the Atlassian Confluence wiki, and provide those tags and related social content (expertise, communities, etc.) directly within MS SharePoint and Outlook. Our out-of-the-box SharePoint webparts were a hit and were on display at the Microsoft booth.

 

As you can imagine, we were very excited with the new release, and there were several very interested potential customers for the technology.  On a much larger scale, however, there were many attendees at the show who were just trying to decide “which Enterprise 2.0 technology should I deploy first, a wiki, a blog, or social bookmarking?

 

The Enterprise 2.0 show in 2009:  what a tremendous change in just one year!  The show attendees were highly knowledgeable, and many were experienced in implementing Enterprise social applications.  In fact, we spoke to many companies that were already making product changes.  They implemented a wiki or a blog a year or two ago, and they are now making decisions to replace technologies which haven’t truly met their needs. I can clearly recall a year ago at the same conference we had to repeatedly explain what a ‘tag’ was and how tagging – specifically in the form of a folksonomy – was useful for sharing/discovering content and expertise. We probably completed over 200 demos at the 2008 conference, and the one question which seemed to be asked the most was “why are some of the words in the tag cloud bigger and bolder?”

 

This year questions from attendees were not much about ‘why’ – why use wikis, blogs, etc. – but more about ‘which’ and ‘how’. People were more interested in ‘which’ wiki, blog, microblogging or collaboration solution to use and the ‘how to’. What are the best practices in implementing E2.0 solutions given the traditional collaboration tools in the existing IT infrastructure? Yes, we know it’s not just about the technology, but how do we get past the ‘cultural’ barriers behind the firewall? Companies have also realized that the true value (ROI if you will) is measured by applying E2.0 principals to ‘improve’ or ‘replace’ existing business processes that simply don’t work today. This is truly a sign of the evolution of a new market.

 

We were really excited to see that our ‘social activity aggregation’ message was well received and resonated with almost everyone who stopped by our booth or attended the presentation. That by itself says a lot about the evolution of this market. The following diagram from our presentation at the show illustrates how Connectbeam fits into a typical social collaboration ecosystem in an enterprise, and help connecting traditional and E2.0 world together. I thought I would use an example and briefly describe the solution in case you missed us at the show:

 

Imagine in a large Fortune global 500 enterprise, Corporate IT has decided to rollout SharePoint MOSS 2007 – that includes wiki and blog capabilities – and NewsGator RSS as company-wide news feed and collaboration platform. Engineering in R&D department, however, have been using Atlassian Confluence wiki to manage day-to-day design, and project team collaborations for a while. The marketing team has been using the Yammer microblogging service for the last 3 months to communicate company news and messages with all employees. The technical support team, on the other hand, has been piloting and now ready to roll out Telligent Community to engage with external customers and partners. There are probably other homegrown tools and solutions in play but let’s just assume this is the current social software footprint at this company. In the long run, each tool above will greatly help employees and management solve a series of collaboration and communication problems. However as ‘standalone solutions’ they create new ‘social information silos’ because they don’t communicate with each other. The content stored in the Confluence wiki by the engineering team might be very valuable and relevant to the product marketing team who uses SharePoint on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily use the R&D wiki – they might not even know that wiki exists! So this and similar real world examples from our clients illustrate the need to aggregate social activities and user generated content across the enterprise regardless of the originating source. That’s where Connectbeam Social Activity Platform^TM comes into play.

 

Social activities from various platforms and solutions above are aggregated through out-of-the-box or custom connectors (using published REST APIs) and the ‘people to people’, ‘people to content’, and ‘content to content’ relationships are analyzed and captured for future collaboration use.  This aggregation service can deliver the most relevant user generated content and activity ‘in the flow’ of the user’s daily workflow – through integration with existing applications and not by introducing yet another destination.  This not only improves overall productivity but also greatly increases the adoption of newly added E2.0 tools in the enterprise collaboration ecosystem.

 

We also believe that a strong analytics solution – not displayed in the picture above but an upcoming part of Connectbeam’s offering – built on top of the social activity repository is an essential part of this service and can greatly help with raising awareness and visibility into ‘how’ people interact and connect with each other and ‘where’ they turn to share and discover information and expertise. One can only imagine how valuable it would be to extend this solution to outside the firewall, connecting customers, partners and suppliers social interactions.

 

So to summarize my thoughts on this year E2.0 conference, I can think of 3 takeaways:

1. The Enterprise 2.0 market is rapidly maturing and decision makers are increasingly interested in applying new social technologies.
2. Large enterprises won't standardize on a single platform or application anytime soon. There will always be valuable social content and activity in point solution.
3. There is a real business need to aggregate and analyze the social metadata and user activity from various collaboration tools and E2.0 solutions across the enterprise, particularly as the number of these tools in use grows.

Looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010 at Boston.

Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0 Is Now Available - Here's the 'Why' Behind the New Release

One of the great things about working with our enterprise customers is that we get a ringside view into what they want to accomplish and what issues they are facing. Companies see the benefits of collaborative information sharing, and are working hard to connect employees and knowledge. Andrew McAfee articulated well the value of information sharing and collaboration in his bulls eye post, which provides a great analysis for the value of internal social networks.  The companies with whom we talk are moving aggressively to create authentic, useful employee social networks.

With that as backdrop, we're pleased to announce today the release of Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Spotlight 3.0 adds a number of features to the Connectbeam application designed to make information and expertise easier to find and share. Full details are available on our Products page. Here are the release highlights:

• Integration with leading enterprise applications
• Feeds of user generated content from Enterprise 2.0 apps
• Social Profiles with both employee-provided knowledge and experience, and real-time updates for their work activities

There's a lot to this release, and the Connectbeam website and data sheets will tell you more.

We wanted to give you a sense of why we released Spotlight 3.0. The reasons shed some light on the direction of the enterprise market.

In-the-flow: Michael Idinopulos of SocialText wrote about the differences of putting tools in-the-flow or above-the-flow of employees' daily activities. This is a critical consideration for vendors in the social computing space, and it's an approach we pioneered here at Connectbeam. To maximize knowledge touch points, and user adoption, inside an organization, we're big fans of in-the-flow tools. That's why Connectbeam integrates with leading enterprise apps. We want to put information and internal resources right at the fingertips of employees.

Connect enterprise apps: Companies have significant investments in their existing technology stacks, both financially and operationally. They also tend to have a collection of best-of-breed apps, particularly in the enterprise social computing realm. Full-suite Enterprise 2.0 solutions are still a ways off. So the problem they're experiencing is a lack of visibility for the amazing amounts of user generated information that has been created inside their walls. Connectbeam sees tying together these different apps as a major benefit for companies. Through our Connectors and APIs, we pull in content created from across the enterprise, including wikis, blogs, news feeds, forums and other applications.

Workstreams: Connectbeam's roots are as the leader in social bookmarking and tagging inside the enterprise. Fundamentally, what we bring is the ability to tap employees as sources of relevant data and filters for what's valuable. From this, everyone in the organization gains. With Spotlight 3.0, we're extending this philosophy by integrating the workstreams of employees. Workstreams include bookmarks, wiki entries, blog posts, forum discussions and other activities. There's tremendous value in providing a single repository where these workstreams:

• Can be organized and are searchable
• Form the basis for social networking and collaboration
• Can be discussed
• Are integrated into the everyday applications that employees use

That's a brief explanation for how we approached Connectbeam Spotlight 3.0. Hats off to the team for a great job pulling this one together.

Cory Treffiletti’s Companies to Watch

Cory Treffiletti writes a blog about marketing strategy and fundamentals. He is President and Managing Partner for Catalyst:SF. Cory's been in interactive marketing and advertising since 1995. He writes a weekly column for Mediapost.

Cory recently published a post, Company to Watch: the Bonus Issue. These companies were drawn primarily from the Stanford Always On! Summit that occurred earlier this month. I was pleased to part of panel, CEO Showcase, at the event. I was also honored to see Connectbeam included in Cory’s list of companies to watch. Cory’s blog is worth looking at if you are interested in emerging trends in marketing, especially through new media.

Should We Live with Software Insecurity?

Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal recently reported on the Black Hat Conference, the tech security conference, in his post, Living with Insecurity. He noted that Ian Angell, a professor of information systems at the London School of Economic, speaking about software insecurity, told the audience just to live with it. Ben said that “while Angell’s advice is everyday behavior for the overwhelming majority of people – albeit without an awareness of the risks they’re taking in most cases – it’s a radical notion at Black Hat.”

It is also a radical notion to many of our clients. This is why we put Connectbeam within an appliance behind the firewall. It also makes updates much easier. There is always some insecurity around but some of it is optional. We are trying to provide a chance to reduce insecurity around enterprise data.

Mixing Hardware and Social Software

Daniela Barbosa recently did an interesting post, A VC Calls for Startup Ideas and I Ponder What I am Doing at Dow Jones, on the list of Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund by VC Paul Graham. She discussed a number of his desired concepts as they relate to her work at Dow Jones. I highly recommend the post.

I was also drawn to look at Paul Graham’s complete list and from this interesting desired idea - Hardware/software hybrids. Paul writes “Most hackers find hardware projects alarming…Hardware is already mostly software. What I mean by a hardware/software hybrid is one in which software plays a very visible role. If you work on an idea of this type you'll tend to have the field to yourself, because most hackers are afraid of hardware, and most hardware companies can't write good software. (One reason your iPod isn't made by Sony is that Sony can't write iTunes.).”

We put our social software into a piece of hardware for many reasons but security is certainly one of them. In addition, with a rapidly changing technology, we did not want clients to have to deal with implementation concerns and face any issues with upgrades. We literally adopted a plug and play approach through a hardware/software hybrid to get things not only inside the firewall but also inside the box, the one we provide. It also enables one click back up and restores, one click upgrades, and automatic authentication. We find that many of our large customers appreciate the added security. It is nice to get the added validation of the concept through Paul Graham’s list.

Connectbeam on the Scoble Show via YouTube

Here is a link to a YouTube presentation of a Connectbeam demonstration I did on the Scoble Show back in 2006. It provides an overview of some of our basic functionality. Hope you enjoy the show. I posted on some of this functionality here at Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking but the video provides a personal look. A longer version is available at the Classic Scoble Show blog.

Social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise – Thomas Vander Wal

I was pleased to see Thomas Vander Wal’s post, Getting More Value in Enterprise with Social Book Marking (via BizTechTalk). Thomas is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy."He is also known for initiating the term "infocloud." Under the subheading social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise, he starts, “Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do…The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed.”

Thomas then goes on to say, “As people also share these bookmarks in the organization with their tags and annotations, they also realize quickly they are becoming a valuable conduit to helping others find information and they grasp the value they will derive from being a resource that adds value in the organization. Other people derive value from information in the organization and outside it being augmented with individual perspectives and context.”

Thomas next has some nice words to say about Connectbeam in this context, “When this is pair(ed) with search, as Connectbeam does with their social search that pairs with existing pairs with existing FAST, Google Search Appliance, and others in-house search engines, the value the whole organization receives is far beyond the cost and minimal effort people are putting into the tools to get smarter, by more easily holding on and sharing what they know.” I have great respect for Thomas’ viewpoints so these words and much appreciated. He has captured our goals at Connectbeam.

Thomas concluded that every attendee to workshops he has delivered on enterprise 2.0 quickly sees that they undervalued the impact and capability of social bookmarking in the enterprise. His firm, InfoCloud Solutions, provides consulting and training in many areas of enterprise 2.0 There is an extensive list of workshops at his InfoCloud Solutions site.

Let’s Not Confuse Tagging with Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is often called tagging or a tagging system. While tagging is an important part of a social bookmarking system, it can cause confusion to say they are the same thing. The wikipedia offers many definitions for tags within eight categories from sports to personal identifiers. The relevant one here is “Tag (metadata), a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information.”

The wikipedia defines social bookmarking as “a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.” It goes on to add,” Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags.” So tags are an important component to most social bookmarking systems but they are just one component and tags are not limited to social bookmarking. Social Bookmarking helped make tagging popular so they are often called tagging systems and the act of using one is often called tagging. Now social bookmarking has moved beyond the internet to move inside the enterprise through tools such as Connectbeam. At the same time, more and more other tools are allowing for tagging as they realize its benefits.

Going to the full definition of tags (metadata) in Wikipedia, we find that, “Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services. It is now also part of some desktop software.”

This widespread use of tags beyond social bookmarking, while providing an added benefit within these systems, has the potential to create multiple silos of tags within the enterprise. This issue is one that we are working on and I will be writing more about it in the coming weeks.

Connectbeam and Microsoft Announce Spotlight ConnectTM for SharePoint 2007

Today, I am pleased that Connectbeam and Microsoft jointly announced, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008, Spotlight Connect™ for SharePoint, an add-on module allowing for the integration of Connectbeam Spotlight™ (formerly referred to simply as Connectbeam) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Availability for the add-on module is planned for July. Our Spotlight Connect™ allows SharePoint to better leverage the “social metadata” that is generated naturally as employees interact with information and colleagues. Now each person’s tags, bookmarks, as well as relevance rankings of these indicators become available and useful to everyone in the organization from within the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform.

A large part of Andrew McAfee’s original vision in Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, was the ability to support more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. He wrote back in 2006, “These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users.” We feel the integration of Connectbeam Spotlight increases the enterprise 2.0 impact of Sharepoint and is part of our ongoing efforts to integrate with enterprise applications.

Connectbeam Spotlight gives employees across the company not only a platform for finding highly relevant information and documents quickly, but also for discovering the people and expertise behind that content. Spotlight makes the social metadata, the data that describes the experiences and knowledge of colleagues from across the company, accessible to everyone through a central tag repository. Here is a demonstration of the Connectbeam Spotlight integration with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

One of our mutual clients, Thomas Chapin, Director, Knowledge Management, WBB Consulting in Reston, Virginia, said, “The fact that Connectbeam allows the capture and use of actual day-to-day and historical human experience in an organization (in conjunction with their central tag repository) means that when paired with SharePoint Server 2007, all the promise about collaboration can actually happen… naturally. As an enterprise license holder of both Connectbeam Spotlight and SharePoint, we’re pretty excited about the possibilities.” So are we. I will have more about this in upcoming posts.

Biggest Enterprise & Web 2.0 Business Obstacles: Security and Information Leakage

Actually, those two issues sound like variations on the same theme. A recent study reported in eWeek, Enterprises Diving into Web 2.0 Waters, said that, “When asked to name their two biggest concerns with social networks and other Web 2.0 technologies, respondents named security more than any other issue (41 percent), followed by a fear that these open platforms would result in leaks of sensitive company information (35 percent).” At the same time adoption of “web 2.0 technologies” was largely driven by the desire to help workers inside the firewall with 82 percent of respondents indicating serving current employees was the adoption driver. Consistent with this goal, when asked about the goal for implementing the new web technologies, 71 percent of respondents said improved communication and collaboration among internal staff, while only 46 percent said it was improved communication and collaboration with customers.

Like other studies on enterprise usage, the study found little love for consumer social networking tools like Facebook but instead businesses looked for tools designed for business objectives. There has been some talk in the press about social networking tools having a negative effect on productivity. The study found the opposite as only 15 percent of respondents worried that the use of the new web tools would cause a hit to employee productivity. Cost reduction is also not a driver even thought some tools are free. Only 15 percent of respondents to the survey named “reduction in IT costs through the use of free apps” as one of their two biggest drivers for implementing Web 2.0. This is not surprising as a free tool might not be the first choice to an enterprise buyer who wants proper support and continuity from the software provider.

The article also quoted a Forrester study that found “three challenges face vendors: IT shops are wary of what they perceive as insecure, consumer-grade technology; ad-supported Web 2.0 tools on the consumer side have set ‘free’ as a starting point; and Web 2.0 technologies enter a crowded space dominated by legacy software investments.”

All of these trends align with our goals at Connectbeam. The security issue was one reason we created Connectbeam as an application packaged and delivered as an Appliance that sits behind company firewall. It is also designed to not compete with legacy enterprise applications but, instead, we integrate with many of them. We did not modify a consumer Web 2.0 application for the enterprise but designed a social networking application for making business connections within the enterprise. The study found that twenty-seven percent of respondents said they had implemented a social network for use at their company and Forrester sees this number as growing, both in an absolute sense and as a percentage of the enterprise 2.0 tools that organizations adopt. This also makes sense as blogs and wikis, the current leaders, can be brought in on an individual basis without approval. A social networking tool has a broader enterprise reach and requires approvals at broader levels to be effective. We are seeing that an increasing number of firms understand the value of business social networking tools and feel excited about what is happening in the market.

Connectbeam Enterprise Social Computing Covered at Minnibar 2008

Matt Craven at Blog Herald recently blogged about a presentation at the May 10th Minnibar by Rich Heog that included his firm’s use of Connectbeam. Minnibar is the Minnesota version of barcamp with the description, “Technology & Design (un)Conference: No Spectators, Only Participants.” Their site is a wiki and is a great use of that tool. There were over 423 participants and the site contains photos, media mentions, blog posts, Twitter updates, and other related information and links.

Matt attended Rich’s presentation and blogged it live. He wrote, “Connectbeam integrates with Exchange Server, if that’s your poison, and integrates with internal Google search appliances as well as external Google searches. It’s not an issue integrating services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and others into the Connectbeam platform.” He later adds that his firm has “tried for years to build a skills database to let folks connect with each other - the tagging within Connectbeam has really fulfilled that function. Senior leaders (direct reports of CEO) are using the system to some extent - and want to foster more connectivity amongst individual contributors throughout the company.”

You can see the whole post at Minnebar: Social Search in the Corporate Environment on Blog Herald. Thanks to Matt and Rich for the coverage. As their site states, “The Blog Herald was founded by Duncan Riley in March 2003 as a premium source of blog and blogging related news for bloggers. It was the first blog dedicated exclusively to the news of the blogosphere and remains the longest (and largest) standing resource of its kind.” Matt Craven is the former editor & publisher of The Blog Herald. Currently, Matt is the co-founder of Bryghtpath LLC, a boutique web 2.0 firm located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He blogs at Telegraphik & The Blog Herald.

Rich Heog also covered his Minnibar talk on his eContent blog in the post, Managing Your Most Important Asset: Knowledge, with photo of the presentation. We continue to appreciate his coverage of Connectbeam..

My Conversation with Matt Moore on Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

I was recently interviewed by Matt Moore, from Sydney Australia, who writes and records the blog, Engineers without Fears. The interview is available as a podcast through his post, podcast - puneet gupta - connectbeam. I was first asked to compare Connectbeam to applications on the consumer web. I mentioned del.icio.us along with Facebook and LinkedIn since we combine social bookmarking with social networking. We made this combination since we feel that connections within the enterprise are best done around ideas and information.

With Connectbeam the content you bookmark can come from many sources inside or outside the enterprise. We can then build a social framework around these tags. This allows you to discover the social context of tags. Matt asked me about usage levels and benefits. I said that we see increased uptake as awareness builds. We are often brought into a firm by people who saw similar capabilities on the consumer web. Then awareness spreads as people see the value.

Another aspect of our solution that is most appealing to businesses and enterprise is the deep level of integration we offer into existing IT infrastructure. For example, if you have an enterprise search engine (e.g. Google Search Appliance, FAST, Microsoft Sharepoint, ...) - Connectbeam can enhance the search experience for your users by turning 'raw' search into 'social' search. Showing you what was useful to whom, and in what context. And providing you the ability to tag search result content, and connect with related users and experts.

As for quantitative benefits, I said we are finding that our customers are not squarely focused on that question just as when email and IM were introduced nobody sat down to draw out a detailed ROI spreadsheet. We are seeing customers receive value in areas like expertise location, helping to pull together the right people for the right job, onboarding new employees faster, retaining and capturing knowledge and information from workers which is otherwise lost in transition or worker turnover. Connectbeam can save a lot of time in this area and lead you to find the people that might not have been uncovered by other means. This can be very helpful in large global organizations.

There is much more on Matt’s podcast. I invite you to listen to our conversation.

Connectbeam Release 2.2 Offers Enhanced Enterprise Application Integration Opportunities for Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

At Connectbeam we have integrated social networking and social bookmarking to enable and support personal connections around work-related ideas within the enterprise. Now we have taken this connection capability a step further as Release 2.2 introduces the Connectbeam web services Application Programming Interface (API) that now enables you to add the full functionality of Connectbeam social software into existing IT applications. The Connectbeam web services API consists of a series of programming interfaces that have been modularized into functional areas such as Social Search, Bookmarking and Tagging, Social Network, and Communities - allowing you to pick and chose the functionality you chose to integrate into your existing applications and IT infrastructure.

For example, integration with Sharepoint allows for the provision of social context data with the information Sharepoint normally provides. Here is a brief demonstration of how this Sharepoint integration works. In the demo a term, java, is entered into the Sharepoint search field. The standard Sharepoint response comes back in the left column of the screen. On the right side additional contextual information is seamlessly delivered through Connectbeam. You can see a listed of related tags, related users, and related bookmarks. Clicking on any of these links brings you to additional information relevant information about the social context of the search. For example, the clicking on one of the related user provides a list of the documents this person has tagged with the search term.

In the second example of Sharepoint integration in the demo, we take you to the profile page of the Sharepoint user. There is an “about me” tab that is part of the standard Sharepoint interface. Next to it is a “social context” tab that brings information from Connectbeam. For the individual who is profiled, you can now see their tags, their bookmarks, and their communities. Each item in each list is a live link to more information. In both cases, the integration between Connectbeam and Sharepoint is complete and not apparent to the user who sees the additional social information as part of the same interface. You can design the interface so the user is not aware there is another application providing this social context.

This integration is certainly not limited to Sharepoint. Connectbeam can integrate with most enterprise applications with open APIs, providing a personalized social context to your company’s information. An increasing number of enterprise applications such as SAP and PeopleSoft are opening their APIs, expanding the playing field for this potential integration. This can open many new opportunities for collaboration with known and previously unknown colleagues. All this information exchange sits safely behind the firewall.

In addition to this enhanced integration capability, Connectbeam’s new Release 2.2 also includes other features. There is automatic user provisioning for LDAP to eliminate extra user registration processes and dynamic email address lookup for ease of community invitations. Enhanced licensing infrastructure also allows you to better monitor application usage and adoption. Multi-language support is offered for global implementations. More information can be found on our Connectbeam web site. Thanks to the AppGap blog for covering this release, Connectbeam Offers New Social Networking Application Integration Possibilities.

Connectbeam launches VMWare Virtual Appliance

We are very pleased to launch today - Connectbeam Virtual Appliance.

Connectbeam Virtual Appliance gives users and companies the option to download, directly from our website, full-featured Social Bookmarking and Social Networking application, and immediately get started.

The entire application can literally be up and running inside your company in a matter of minutes.

If you have a VMPlayer installed, simply go to our download page to download Connectbeam application.

If you dont have the VMPlayer installed, you can download it for free here.

For many companies Virtual Appliance will continue to suffice the need.
For those who wish to get started quickly, can now start their evaluation and deployment with the Virtual Appliance. As the usage grows, Connectbeam application provides a seamless migration path from the Virtual Appliance to our high-end Physical Appliance using the backup and restore feature under the administration console.

Connectbeam releases 'one-click' application upgrade feature

We have always maintained that the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 applications should go beyond the collaboration and productivity increases for businesses, but should also translate into reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for these applications (particularly w.r.t. installation, set up, and maintenance).

To that end, with Release 2.0 of our product we have launched a breakthrough feature - Single Click Upgrade.

Most of today's behind the firewall applications require a multi-part, multi-step upgrade process that consume tremendous amount of time and resources.

With Connectbeam this process is reduced to a single click.

The screen shot below is from the Administration section of Connectbeam application. All it takes to upgrade to the next release (or patch) is a simple single click of the Upgrade button.

Socialmediatoday on Connectbeam

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Ives, author of the popular socialmediatoday blog.

He does a great job of describing our product solution, and captures the essence of our approach to social media inside enterprises quite accurately - when I described to him, that:

"Our fundamental belief is that social networking when it comes to businesses and enterprise, has to be front-ended with information access and discovery.”

Thus the networking begins around sharing information and social bookmarking comes into play. In addition to individual sharing, Connectbeam allows for group sharing through communities.

Why you need Connectbeam? Hear it from people out in the field...

We had the pleasure of recently giving a product demonstration to folks from PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Ricardo Sueiras and Martin Dugage are both well aware of issues facing enterprises around better and more effective collaboration, and information discovery. They are both smart and well connected on the scene with social software, and how it benefits enterprises, and have written about it on their respective blogs.

Excerpt from Ricardo's blog:

It was a really excellent demo. The product itself is simple enough to understand, and works on the concept of using tags to connect information to people and communities. By using the concept that users use internal and external datasources to find information (anything that can be linked) the application provides a front end for this data – infact, anything that can be linked (has a URL) is a valid datasource. If one doesn‘t exist, you can even write your own.

Excerpt from Martin's blog:

...it looks like a great knowledge sharing solution for the corporate world. We still are in a world where corporate people do write short blackberry e-mails and client deliverables, but do not publish what they know in the form of blog posts or wiki pages. It will change some day, and maybe suddenly, but not now, at least not in this country (France). So building and managing links across people and content - which is what KM is really about - should work much better if it's based on the current demand-oriented and quite selfish behaviors of the average corporate employee. As such, social bookmarking tools such as Connectbeam could be seen as the stepping stone to the cultural change we all want to see taking place.

Martin brings up a great point. Something that has been at the very core of the foundation of Connectbeam as a company. He captures the enterprise user landscape (and sentiment) as it is today. At Connectbeam, it has always been our belief, and most of us at Connectbeam have worked at large companies, that the basic psyche or fabric of what motivates, and how information is shared inside a business or an enterprise is vastly different from what we see out on the consumer Web. The status quo is exactly what Martin as outlined above.

We feel social bookmarking is the most frictionless, seamless, and least disruptive to the existing environment, and yet delivers unparalleled benefits.

Ricardo and Martin also brought up an interesting point about ownership of bookmarks. Please see our response to it on Ricardo's blog.

Connectbeam announces Release 2.0 and Starter Appliance trial offer for $1,995

Today, we are announcing the general availability of our product release version 2.0.

In partnership and feedback from several customers, we are proud to bring to you innovative and break-through product features and enhancements, that are easy to use, and delivered to the user at their place and point of search. This will further empower team collaboration, people and information discovery - leading to unparalleled worker productivity inside enterprises.

The product tour link from our website will give you a high level overview of the new product and features.

Customers challenged us to deliver an application solution around information access and discovery, and team collaboration that did the following:

Where ever the user turns to search (inside the company or outside), deliver to user search results and information from:

1. Their own collection
2. What others in their social network have contributed
3. What is inside the company (Intranet)
4. What they find outside the company (Internet)

We deliver this experience to the user by presenting their social graph and view of their collective intelligence right at their point of search by integrating Connectbeam with their search experience through their web browser. Connectbeam's patented design and architecture delivers this in a completely secure and bullet proof manner, since Connectbeam's Collective Search Toolbar is installed and driven from the Connectbeam Appliance which sits behind company firewall and in control of IT administrator.

Simply put, rather than asking user to turn to yet another social software site to find information to get their work done, we deliver the information to where ever the user turns to in their universe of search.

To see a full list of Connectbeam features, please click here.

To see different Appliance models, and feature comparison, please click here.

We are also announcing a limited time, trial offer for 500 users for 120 days for $1,995. This includes the Starter Appliance hardware and full featured Connectbeam application.

Customers can place the order online, directly from our website.

At the end of the trial period, customers can chose to renew and extend the license, or not renew. In either event, the Appliance is for customers to keep - they do not have to return it if they don't renew the license.
We understand, you will inevitably put proprietary and sensitive data on the Appliance, thus specifically for this reason to not jeopardize your data, we understand that the Appliance be not removed from your location.

A note of thanks to our customers...pharmaceuticals to manufacturing

Every day we come into work feeling excited and energized by the tremendous opportunities we see in front of us based on the positive impact social software is having on businesses across all verticals.

It is particularly invigorating to have these customers and prospects enagage with us and when, out of their own volition, they share their sentiments and experiences of working with social software initiatives in connection with Connectbeam.

Simon Revell who works for a large pharmaceutical company, recently had this to say to about their need for social bookmarking and their experience with Connectbeam:

Social Bookmarking

We continue to experiment with our social bookmarking pilot - based on Scuttle.  We’re also about to kick off an evaluation of ConnectBeam, which I’m incredibly excited about.  I love the product.  Love the company - a very switched on and professional bunch - they really understand the enterprise environment and hence their product takes a web2.0 concept but then re-engineers it intelligently for the enterprise.

As I commented on his blog, it has been a pleasure working with him and learning from him some of the use cases of how they are using social bookmarking and where they want to head with it.

Another such person is Rich Hoeg of Honeywell who has often written about his exprience with Connectbeam and the broader impact of social software in enterprises.

We take this moment to thank all our customers and prospects for their trust and belief in us and our products. We have many new exciting and innovative features that we are grearing up to bring to the market very soon.

Connectbeam to showcase at Intel Developer Forum (IDF)

We are pleased to be invited by Intel to present and showcase our product at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) taking place this week (Sept. 18-20,2007) at Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco.

IDF is Intel's premier forum for bringing its partners, customers, and prospects under one roof. Over 5,000 attendees will be at the IDF. This year there is a special floor area dedicated toward the theme of - The Digital Enterprise. If you are attending, please do take a minute to come by our booth in the Digital Enterprise area to see a product demonstration, and a chance to win a free iPhone.

The World is Flat - so is Learning 2.0 via social bookmarking and tagging

Rich Hoeg at the popular eContent blog outlines the power of social bookmarking coupled with social networking to reach across departmental and geographic boundaries as levers for better knowledge sharing, discovery, and collaboration.

An excerpt (screen shot) from his video presentation is shown below. To see his blog post and watch his video presentation, click here...

Connectbeam explained...making it easy for enterprise adoption

This is one of the best descriptions of our product that we have seen on the blogsphere.

Stacey Higginbotham of the Tech Confidential Blog at The Deal.com articulates it beautifully, as follows:

One of the larger problems associated with bringing social-networking and Web 2.0 products to corporate users is that corporate users may not want to deal with learning yet another computer program. It’s frustrating enough for most average computer users when their favorite Web sites or Windows applications change, so when faced with an entirely new way to think about information and the way to work, it’s almost too much.

Connectbeam Inc. is hoping to gently lead enterprise users into Web 2.0 functionality through its bookmarking and networking software. The company, which recently raised a $3.5 million Series A round from Gabriel Venture Partners and Startup Capital Partners, has signed up Honeywell International Inc. and others to place a Connectbeam appliance into whatever existing Intranet search service the company uses. That way when users search a corporate Intranet, they will also find recent bookmarks and project notes from colleagues anywhere in the company, and anywhere in the world.

Two good things about Connectbeam are that it doesn’t ask for new behaviors from all users to become useful, and the software is sold as an appliance. Selling software as an appliance allows for the corporation to control the data inside the corporate firewall, but without having to load, customize and manage packages software. Negatives might be the competition. BEA is launching its own bookmarking and tagging software, and plenty of larger players like IBM Corp. are muscling their way into all aspects of Web 2.0.

...and i would add that competition is a good thing. This is an emerging market, making it fun for all.

Connectbeam at Procter & Gamble

Joe Schueller and team at Procter & Gamble, when speaking with InformationWeek at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, outline the value of what a Social Bookmarking and Social Networking solution like Connectbeam can do, when deployed behind their company firewall and integrated with their corporate Intranet.

So the company's testing a product from Connectbeam that works with Google. Connectbeam lets employees share bookmarks and tag articles, pages, and documents with descriptive words. When an employee searches for something using the Google appliance, Connectbeam results--related tags and bookmarks--are returned alongside the Google results.

At Connectbeam, we have always held the belief, that the key to user adoption inside the enterprise is to:

1. Deliver your Enterprise 2.0 application via a path of improvement to innovation.
That is, introduce your application to the end user as part of their existing IT workflow (as an extension of somethign that they are already familiar with and use).
Internally at Connectbeam, we call this - the handshake to the past principle.

2. Align business users and IT by delivering value to both. For IT, help them extract greater ROI from an investment that they have already made (ride on top of an existing IT infrastructure).

Connectbeam features in InfoWorld's Month of Enterprise Startups

InfoWorld celebrates the month of May 2007 by paying homage to business-focused technology startups. Each day they featured a new startup (established no earlier than 2004) that is a rising star in the IT enterprise.

Ephraim Schwartz covers Connectbeam as Social Bookmarking and Social Networking for the enterprise.

Using Tagging to finding the proverbial Needle in a Haystack

At a recently conducted survey at Scientific Computing webinar around knowlege management and information search, the survey results once again highlighted the frustration people have with the status quo of search for meaninful information today.

Rich Hoeg, as one of the participants, talks about this on his blog and recommends tagging as a way to crack this problem by bringing "context" to search.

Connectbeam has mastered Social Search says Social Computing Magazine

Social Computing Magazine describes and talks about the value of Social Search inside the enterprise and highlights Connectbeam's unique approach toward providing a social search experience via combining features of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking.

The key to social search in an enterprise context is identifying and connecting each enterprise worker with colleagues whose interests and knowledge enhances their own.

Privately held Connectbeam, located in California's Silicon Valley, has mastered this. Its Social Bookmarking & Networking Appliance, a pre-configured appliance server deployed behind the enterprise firewall, highlight information from colleagues' searches, especially the information that they have found most useful.

Full article can be found here.