The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog

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.

The Lessnau Lounge on Social Bookmarking

John Lessnau has created a number of web sites including LinkXL.com that has provided a new brokerage model. He also publishes The Lessnau Lounge that offers Twitter feeds. It covers electronics, internet marketing, linkage, pop culture, and social media. It is interesting to see a site that shifts through and offers Twitter tweets. Twitter is on the rise. TechCrunch wrote that in March 2008 there over a million users, and over three million Twitter messages a day. Aggregating them around topics is a good thing.

His Twitter tweets about Social Bookmarking as of August 27, 2008 mentioned one of our blog posts, The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog: ROI for Social Bookmarking: Very Large Possibilities. I am grateful for this and that was how I learned of the Lessnau Lounge.

ROI for Social Bookmarking: Very Large Possibilities

Rawn Shah of IBM recently blogged that the IBM enterprise tagging social software saves IBM $4.6 million a year. Like Connectbeam, the enterprise tagging system (ETS) at IBM allows for social bookmarking within the enterprise so I was very interested to see how they developed their business case and the results they achieved. They developed their application on Dogear for their enterprise tagging service, which is a sub-component within Lotus Connections. It is deployed across their intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties: traditional search engine results, top content pages, and web applications. Connectbeam pioneered this sidebar display appraoch of combining bookmarked and tagged results alongside raw enterprise intranet search results. Connectbeam can do this with tools such as Sharepoint and Google Enterprise Search, External Internet Search, as well as stand on its own.

Rawn wrote that the ETS team did a survey asking users how this tool helped them. They found that the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain. The system cost $700,000 to build and deploy across IBM Intranet. While it can be argued that general time savings ROIs are hard to place on a balance sheet, increased efficiency on this scale certainly needs to be respected. They also found that the reusability of the ETS page widget resulted in an additional $2.4 million in cost avoidance since it did not have to be re-implemented for each site.

Promoting Innovation and Co-creation Within the Enterprise

McKinsey recently released a study on the topic of co-creation, The Next Step in Open Innovation. The abstract says, “The Internet and new social-networking technologies are allowing companies and their customers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. Some leading organizations are using this opportunity to draw customers into the heart of the product-development process.” However, they also caution, “Cocreating products and services with customers, however, is uncertain territory fraught with challenges and questions—for instance, who owns the resulting intellectual property?”

I think reaching out to customers and the wider internet is a great idea. Cisco’s I-Prize is a wonderful example. Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. This is a smart move but we do not want overlook another important source of innovation, those within our own enterprise.

A number of years ago a major manufacturer launched a search to find best practices to reduce costs at their plants, only to discover that these best practices were operating within their own plants but they did not have an effective means to discover this knowledge. Now with the tools of enterprise 2.0 we can look more effectively inside the organization, as well the wider web. This is a goal at Connectbeam, to help firms discover the innovation within. Intellectual property and some of the other issues with co-creation outside the organization are greatly simplified when we look inside.

Getting the Right Balance of Convention and Innovation Through Small World Networks

Brian Uzzi (Northwestern) and Jarrett Spiro (Stanford) recently published a study, Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem in the American Journal of Sociology. They begin the article by noting that “creativity aids problem solving, innovation, and aesthetics, yet our understanding of it is still forming. We know that creativity is spurred when diverse ideas are united or when creative material in one domain inspires or forces fresh thinking in another.” In other words when new connections are made.

The authors analyzed the small world network of the creative artists who made Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989. The Broadway musical networks they examined shows that between teams arise when artists work in more than one musical and create dense overlapping clusters that are prototypical of a small world network.

Any successful production is likely to be a combination of convention and innovation. Innovation comes from material that extends conventions by showing these conventions in a new form or mode of presentation. Just as conventions are learned and gather strength within networks of personal contact and repeated public performance, innovative extensions often emerge when artists are exposed to other conventions besides the ones they have been using, thus inspiring or forcing creativity.

However, they found limits to this effect. Too much internal connectivity reduces some of the creative distinctiveness of clusters, which can homogenize the pool of creative material. At the same time, problems of excessive cohesion can creep in. In this case, the ideas most likely to be implemented can be too conventional rather than fresh ideas because of the common information effect and because newcomers find it harder to land “slots” on productions.

I think in the same way innovation within the enterprise occurs when there is a balance between established team connections and the introduction of new connections. A tool like Connectbeam that combines social networking around ideas helps to bring new connections to keep stirring the innovation pot within the organization. At the same time it can support the work of established teams and help with cohesion. It was interesting to see this concept appear in an academic study. Thanks to Bill Ives and Valdis Krebs for pointing out this study.

New Aberdeen Report Indicates that Best-in Class Companies Make Greater Use of Social Computing

I recently read the June 2008 Aberdeen Group report, Workforce Collaboration and Web 2.0, that has some nice things to say about social bookmarking and social computing, in general. The report drew on an aggregation of surveys and interviews with more than 270 organizations worldwide. They defined workforce collaboration as “connecting employees and sharing knowledge to achieve identifiable goals.” That sounds like our objectives for Connectbeam.

For purposes of their analysis, the Aberdeen Group divided companies into best-in-class, industry average, and laggards. The best-in-class group reduced project completion time on average by 34%, shortened time to resolution on average by 22%, improved new employee time-to-productivity on average by 19% and decreased training cost per employee on average by 14%. These are all good numbers.

Using these distinctions, Aberdeen then looked at the use of web 2.0 (aka social software) for collaboration in the best-in-class group. They found that 39% of companies that are considered best in class use social software to find the experts within their organization while only 20% of companies than are not considered best in class do this. This means that best-in-class organizations are 69% more likely to use social software to ensure employees are connected to subject matter experts.

These best-in-class organizations also make significantly greater us of social software throughout the employee talent management process. For example, 48% of best-in-class organizations use social software to help with employee on-boarding while only 11% of the others do this. An important part of on-boarding is finding the right people in the organization and to understand who knows what about what. These are all objectives for Connectbeam.

The Aberdeen report said that these best-in-class organizations are using social software in more strategic ways and more “more likely to focus on capturing institutional knowledge, expertise, and experiences, codifying it and making it available throughout the organization.” I could do agree more. They also said that these best-in-class companies “focus on generating and capturing content form the workforce and allowing others to access it and add to it.”

There is a lot of additional valuable material in the report. The Aberdeen report concluded with these required actions for companies than want to be best-in-class and remain in this status. They must capture and transfer organizational know-how, seek collaboration between IT, HR, business managers to ensure the right technologies can be supported, and educate stakeholders on the potential and derived value of workforce collaboration. The first action has been covered above. I think the second is also critical as there needs to be an enterprise strategy for social software to achieve the network effects on enterprise collaboration and information access and to avoid creating a lot of silos of disconnected social software tools. This second goal is essential to produce the substantial value that can be communicated in line with the third action.

This is one in a series of analyst’s reports that are consistently coming out of the value of enterprise social computing. I have covered the Gilbane report on Collaboration and Social Media-2008, the Forrester Report on how Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, the AIIM Research on the Need for Integrated Approach to Enterprise 2.0, and the Forrester Predictions of Large Growth in Social Networking Market. Each of these reports are consistent with, and support, the Aberdeen conclusions.

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web (and Enterprise) Search?

Here is an interesting paper, Can Social Bookmarking
Improve Web Search?, I found (via ReadWriteWeb and Mike Gotta). It starts with the statement that search is probably the most important application on the web and goes on to say, “what will be the next big thing that substantially improves search quality? One of the big contenders for this "next big thing" is social search: the idea of adding user annotations or other metadata to the process.” So they looked at the question in their title, Can Social Bookmarking
Improve Web Search?, by studying the effects of del.icio.us. Their main major findings were: “Social bookmarking URLs are full of new and fresh information (Results 1 and 2). Tags on URLs are often redundant given title, domain, and page text (Results 10 and 11). Social bookmarking is probably still a bit small to have a big impact on web search (Results 8 and 9).”

As I have written, social bookmarking and tags are not the same thing. Enterprise social bookmarking goes beyond simply applying tags and tags are used widely outside social bookmarking in a variety of tools. I like the first two results as they support the use of social bookmarking. In terms of the results 10 and 11, this redundancy is generally avoided with type of tagging done through Connectbeam.

This research was done in the context of the consumer web, where I guess you need that critical mass of tags relative to the overall index of the entire World Wide Web. Things work differently within the enterprise where the volume within the index is smaller. Also, the fact that page links do not get refreshed as often in an enterprise search index setting (compared to public internet), that adds a new parameter to this research and equation that was not even touched upon in this research as it primarily focused at the consumer web. Therefore, our take is that this inflexion point of influence described in results 8 and 9 above arrives much sooner in the enterprise. In addition to providing social information to complement search results, Connectbeam can also be used to augment enterprise taxonomies and search indexing.

CMS Watch Says to Look Carefully at Social Software Vendors, Big and Small

Computerworld recently commented on a study by CMS Watch that found a “general lack of system and administrative services threatens to undermine the benefits of improved collaboration and networking from social software technologies.” Tom Byrne, CMS Watch founder’s comments are based on a recent CMS Watch study’s findings that evaluated 20 major social software suppliers through extensive technology research and customer interviews.

Tom commented that while enterprise customers are showing increasing interest in extending internal social tools outside the firewall, vendors are having difficulty supporting customers’ internal and external environments at the same time. CMS Watch attributes this difficulty to significantly different functional, performance, and security profiles of both environments. CMS Watch commented that while the large players like “Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have actively promoted their social software products, each arrived relatively late in this market segment. Consequently, such vendors still rely on established portal services for key functionalities.”

I am pleased that they found a silver lining in the study, “Despite the gloomy study results, CMS Watch notes some exceptions such as wiki vendor Atlassian that provides comparatively strong security and access control. The analyst firm says that hosted community vendor Awareness has good multi-site management; while Connectbeam’s social networking solution provides highly functional back-up and restoration services.”

The Computerworld article concludes, “"Customers should not automatically assume that social software modules from their incumbent vendors are somehow more mature or better integrated than some of the smaller players in this space," says CMS Watch research analyst, Jarrod Gingras.” I am very pleased to see Connectbeam included in this group of respected smaller players. We have focused on the needs of the enterprise, and internal deployment from the start with increased security and other features. We are also working to integrate with and enhance the offering of the large players with our Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Enterprise Search integration.

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.

More on the Rise of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking in Enterprise 2.0

The recent Gilbane report on Collaboration and Social Media-2008 has some interesting statistics. In their research Gilbane looked at medium-sized to very large companies — $25 million or above in revenue and more than 250 employees in size. They picked this size as they felt firms of this size or larger are most likely to be seeking solutions to their communications, collaboration, and information sharing problems. I would agree. Working with the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, headed by Nora Barnes, the survey researchers conducted telephone interviews with 286 respondents in November and December 2007.

Among other things they looked at how people were using social media and how they felt about a number of social media, both channels that might be considered Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. When asked to rate different media as "very effective" - social bookmarking – (46%), mashups (48%), and social networking (59%) achieved the three highest scores of enterprise 2.0 tools , well ahead of blogs, wikis. podcasts, and even RSS. They also added that social bookmarking adoption rates are expected to grow significantly (66%) next year. This is consistent with the Forrester Reports I commented on earlier (see Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?) and more recently (Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies). I am pleased to see this growing recognition of the value of social bookmarking and social networking within the enterprise.

They conclude their extensive report with the following statement. “Over the next five years, we expect the social media tools and technologies to continue to improve, the domain knowledge to expand, and the methodologies to become more sophisticated. Among the emerging population of digital natives, collaboration skills are well developed and participation in communities is a way of life. All in all, we believe that collaboration and social media will be among the fastest-growing technologies and that the information needs of business people throughout the world will be better served.”

This report is further validation that there is a growing market here. Members of our team were recently at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston where we served as a sponsor. We heard that attendance was double from last year and last year was double the year before. We certainly had a lot of interest in our booth and were glad to attend.

More on Integrating Enterprise 2.0 Social Data

I am pleased to see more conversation on creating the integrated Enterprise 2.0 environment. In this case it occurs in a blog post under that name by Ben Gardener on Dif-fer-en-ti-ate. Ben is an internal consultant at a large blue chip Pharmaceutical company based in the UK. His current role involves facilitating clients with re-engineering their work processes.

Ben lays out an architecture to get the social side of enterprise data acting together. There are three components in his scheme.

1. Single User ID – so users have a single identity across all the tools. As Ben writes, Enterprise 2.0 has a big advantage over Web 2.0 as it can leverage this via LDAP or Active Directory.

2. RSS Enterprise Server – an RSS enterprise server could provide a tacit method of aggregating all content from social computing applications with an RSS feed.

3. Tagging Service - this would provide a way to aggregate all keywords/tagging and annotations a user assigns to the content they interact with along with their microblogging.

Ben writes that this approach is achievable. I would agree and it is something we are looking into as it would be very beneficial to the realization of the rich connections possible with enterprise 2.0. I will be writing more on this in the coming weeks. See the post Providing an Integrated Tagging Feature Set for the conversation so far.

Providing an Integrated Tagging Feature Set

John Eckman wrote an interesting post, Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Social Bookmarking and Tagging, after attending the session of Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas is the man who coined the term “folksonomy. ” The wikipedia now defines this term as “the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content.” It also gives Thomas credit for its origins.

John focuses provides the presentation from Thomas’s session and focuses on the portion where he says “the tools are “too simple” - where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.” Thomas says that tags can be lacking structure and less effective when there is no grouping of taggers, the ID does not tie to a person or profile, and there is a lack of a relationship with the tagger. He also adds that they need to work across many applications and services.

I agree completely with both John and Thomas. This is our goal at Connectbeam as I have written in a number of posts on this blog. We want to provide a tagging capability that integrates to enterprise applications, as well as profile information on the tagger and their communities. We combine social bookmarking with social networking. I will not repeat past posts but you can find how this works at the following:

Connectbeam and Microsoft Announce Spotlight ConnectTM for SharePoint 2007

Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

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

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.

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..

Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

According to many surveys, including the Forrester report I recently commented on, social networking is on the rise within the enterprise. I will continue to discuss our new directions on this blog, as well as general thoughts on our industry, but before going on, I want to share our fundamental belief about how to make social networking effective within the enterprise. It has to be built around business information access and discovery. This is why we integrated social networking and social bookmarking within Connectbeam from the start. As we mention on our web site, our goal is to connect people with ideas. We do this through four interrelated approaches: social bookmarking and tagging that leads to information discovery: social networking that leads to people discovery: expertise location that leads to communities of interest; and collective intelligence that provides the most relevant search results and their social context. We see these connections helping people within our clients to solve their business problems. We have found that Connectbeam spreads virally across an enterprise as people see the results of connecting the information and social sides of search. It makes enterprise 2.0 concrete without referring to the term or needing to propose the concept in the abstract.

We work in a standalone mode or integrated with other enterprise applications such as Portals like Sharepoint, Enterprise Search sytems like Google Search Appliance, FAST, and more, to add social context to search and allow for more social networking around search for information. I have covered the Sharepoint integration elsewhere. We also connect with Google Search Appliance, and FAST to provide additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Enterprise Search Integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities right within these enterprise search application front-ends. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. Just as with our Sharepoint integration, our Google and FAST integration takes the Google Search Appliance and FAST even deeper into enterprise 2.0.This Enterprise Search connection not only integrates social bookmarking with social networking, but it also integrates social networking with search. These are just two examples of how we integrate with existing IT applications. I will cover the full spectrum of our integration with spans beyond portals and enterprise search into additional enterprise IT applications in subsequent posts.

We also wanted to take a novel approach to implementation to be more competitive with the large players entering this space. With a rapidly changing technology, we did not want clients to have to deal with implementation and deployment (getting the application up and running) concerns and face any issues with upgrades. This is why we created a hardware and software solution combined, packaged and delivered as a turn key Appliance that allows for a real plug and play solution to get things not only inside the firewall but also inside the box. It also enables one click back up and restores, one click upgrades, and automatic authentication to your enterprise directory services. We have been pleased that a number of the very large enterprises have adopted Connectbeam. Given their respective markets, these clients have appreciated the security, control, and flexibility around deep IT integration that the box offers, as well as our basic social software functionality.

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 at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 - April 6-10 in Las Vegas

If you are planning to attend the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas on April 6-10, 2008 come by the Connectbeam booth for a product demo and a chance to win an Apple TV.

We are located at booth #122.

The conference takes place at the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

Connectbeam is also proud to share the Gartner's Cool Vendor spotlight with Alfabet, Intalio, Opalis, and Primavera.

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.

Value of Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

Thomas Vanderwal, a principle at InfoCloud Solutions, also best known for coining the term 'folksonomy' and 'infocloud' writes about the value of Social bookmarking in the Enterprise.

Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do. The employees and members of the organization are all trying to do their job better and smarter. The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed. I am a huge fan of social bookmarking tools to help along these lines as it helps people hold on to information they have need, want, or have interest in (particularly with future uses) and put things in their own context and perception. Once people understand the value they derive from using the tools to hold on to information out of their vast flow and streams of information and data that run before them each day they quickly "get it".

Full write-up can be found here...

InfoCloud Solutions provides a series of workshops for businesses and enterprises to better understand and evaluate social productivity applications.

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.

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...

Enterprises and social networks...

David Terrar over at blognation UK wrote about the issues around social networking in the Enterprise, particularly many companies rushing to block access to mostly consumer facing social networking sites.

I feel the winning combination is some compromise between the features of the open, free for all consumer facing networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, but customized to address the unique attributes of a business.

We cannot discount the fact that companies need to, and have to, guard and protect their intellectual property (IP). And IP takes different shapes and forms across different businesses. I think this fact is often overlooked when news crosses the wire about some company blocking access to a consumer facing social site.

We discovered during early days of Connectbeam that campanies are not necessarily averse to social software (most understand it and like it), but not at the expense or risk of exposing their IP. We are seeing tremendous uptake on our Appliance product offering, which delivers social bookmarking and social networking software in a box, deployed behind company firewall, to build and foster social networks and communites inside businesses.

Yes, while this might start off by limiting the scope of social networking to within the walls of the campny, we feel this is nonetheless, a very good first step.

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 announces Series A funding

In pursuit of better serving our customers and increasing our pace of bringing new and innovative products to market, we are pleased to announce our Series A funding of $3.5 Million.

Gabriel Venture Partners lead the round syndicated with Startup Capital Ventures. We are absolutely delighted to welcome to our board Jim Long, representing Gabriel Ventures, and Bob Rees, representing Startup Capital. A long time believer in Connectbeam and a fellow Oracle alum, Jnan Dash also joins our board of directors. Connectbeam, together with our community of customers and partners stands to greatly benefit from the collective experience of our board members.

We move into this next phase of our company growth with very strong fundamentals, thanks again to our customers, investors, and a best in class team firing on all cylinders.

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.

CIO Insight - The Appliance Model

CIO Insight magazine has a good article by John Parkinson on putting I.T. Appliances to work.

John lists areas such as storage, search, security, email management, data analytics, and system management - where Appliances are already in place inside corporate data centers.

The availability of industry-standard components and Linux have radically altered the economics of the appliance approach. Appliances benefit from the established set of monitoring and management standards that let them behave as good citizens in the network in a way that general-purpose computing platforms and software can't.

For enterprises, who must have their data behind the firewall, Appliance is a good fit.

We welcome you to contact us to see a demo of our Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Application packaged as an Appliance, and to discuss a fit for your organization.

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.