The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

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 We still are in a world where corporate people do write short blackberry e-mails and client deliverables, but do not publish what they know in the form of blog posts or wiki pages.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.

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 sponsors Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston

Connectbeam is proud to be a sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Conference will take place in Boston from June 18-21, 2007.

Special discount for Connectbeam customers and prospects:
Save $200 on the Conference or get a free Demo Pass.

This conference is organized by one of the same groups that put together the recently concluded Web 2.0 Expo last month (April 2007) in San Francisco.

Enterprise 2.0 conference is squarely aimed at businesses and enterprises looking to see how '2.0' techonolgies are impacting businesses.

If you are planning to be at the conference, or are going to be in and around the Boston area, please come by the conference and our booth. We look forward to telling you more about Connectbeam and answering any questions you might have.

We will also be giving product demonstrations, and sharing with you how enterprises are using Connectbeam to break through knowledge silos, and helping users find and discover information, and connecting with people inside the organization who can help with that information - quickly and effectively.

Connectbeam links social bookmarking to the enterprise, says The451Group

For businesses and enterprises looking to evaluate the use of social bookmarking for their organizations, here are couple of industry analysts reports that can help you understand these technologies, their impact, and the market landscape around them. They further outline the areas best fit for these applications, and how to get started.

We are proud and humbled to be recognized as the leaders and innovators in this space by the leading industry Analysts.

The451group, recently published their report outlining Connectbeam's unique approach of combining social bookmarking and social networking, and delivering that to the enterprise by integrating it on top of enterprise search.

The report is titled - Connectbeam links social bookmarking to the enterprise.

And it can be found here (subscription required).

The451Group's assessment concludes the following:

Among the new lot of social software, wikis and blogs are getting a lot of attention at the enterprise level, but it may well be social bookmarking and tagging tools that have the bigger impact. Connectbeam seems to have come out of the gate with the right focus and understanding of large enterprise needs. Its search integrations make it easy to demonstrate the value of the system and let customers layer it on top of existing tools.

Gartner, earlier this year, put out a report titled - Cool Vendors in the High Performance Workplace, 2007, and acknowledged Connectbeam's market leadership position in the category of Social Bookmarking and Tagging for the enterprise, by honoring Connectbeam as a 'Cool Vendor' for 2007.

Gartner's assessment concludes the following:

Connectbeam social bookmarking and tagging are easy to deploy, intuitive to use, and add value.

The report can be found here (subscription required).

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.