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.

Mining Social Software Interactions to Develop the Enterprise Social Graph

In doing some research, we came across an excellent white paper by Laurence Lock Lee, James Matheson and Stewart Mader. In WikiMining, WikiNetworks and Wikinomics, the authors studied the co-editing and commenting interactions of participants in the wikipatterns.com wiki community.

Objectives of this research included:

• Measuring the health of the wiki community,
• Understanding which participants had the highest network centrality, and
• Seeing how well this interaction analysis correlated to the actual social relationships among participants

We've written previously about social network analysis and its value in a corporate setting. While the wikipatterns.com research is not in the enterprise, much of its analysis is consistent with Professor Rob Cross's work on employee networks inside organizations. Read the paper for some good real-world context to the principles of social network analysis.

What especially caught our eye were these two findings:

1. Correlation of inferred social networks to surveyed actual social networks
2. Percentage of relationships that occurred strictly because of the wiki

Let's examine these two findings a bit more.

Correlation to Actual Social Networks

The study's authors mined the editing and commenting interactions among the wiki participants. The idea here is that if you and a colleague both edit a wiki page, that is tallied as a "relationship unit" between the two of you. By analyzing the depth and breadth of these relationships, the authors constructed a social graph among the participants. These map of the social graph, called a sociogram, is shown below:

 

The authors then surveyed wikipattern.com participants, asking them to identify their actual social relationships within the wiki community. Only a subset of people responded, but enough did to construct a meaningful stated social network for participants.

The authors then compared the inferred social network to the stated social network. The basis of comparison was "degree centrality", which analyzes the number of connections a person has. The table below shows the Top 5 participants based on degree centrality:

 

In looking at the top five most central participants, four names show up in both lists. In reviewing all participants, the authors find a statistically significant 0.77 correlation.

What this says is that there is likely a way to use social software, such as wikis, to mine the enterprise social graph. The study authors are appropriately cautious with this declaration. Their study is one of the first we've seen that tackles this idea.

Social Software Fosters New Relationships

An important benefit of social software is the diversification of one's relationships, which we've discussed here before. Finding and interacting with others outside of your regular internal contacts has tremendous value for you personally, and for your company overall.

In conducting the wikipattern.com user survey, participants were asked to characterize the relationships they had with others on the wiki. There were four options:

• Prior relationship > 2 years
• Prior relationship < 2 years
• Relationship created through the wiki but now extending beyond it
• Relationship through the wiki only

The survey participants characterized a totla of 117 relationships based on one of these four options. Of those 117 relationships, 37 were the latter two types - formed through the wiki. In other words nearly a third of the relationships were based on participating in the wiki.

This finding is valuable. It shows that providing an open collaboraiton and sharing platform results in new connections not previously made. Which is a key benefit of Enterprise 2.0.

Looking forward to more research in this area.

Enterprise 2.0 and Human Capital Management

We were checking out SlideShare presentations last week, and came across a nice one by Knowledge Infusion. Knowledge Infusion consults with companies on human capital management. Clients include MetLife, Dow Jones, Symantec, AAA and Lawrence Berkeley Labs.

Their presentation is titled "Social Collaboration and Talent". There are some interesting points made in the presentation, and we wanted to discuss them. First, here's the presentation:

Social Collaboration And Talent - Knowledge Infusion (Feb 2009)

View more presentations from Jason Corsello. (tags: jason_corsello knowledge_infusion)

Now, let's talk about some of Knowledge Infusion's slides.

Slide 13: The Concepts of "Management" Are Changing

The emerging relationship of employees to management de-emphasizes transaction feedback as the primary interaction. In terms of talent management, leading HR-oriented firms are focusing more on back-n-forth interactions, conversations and what employees contribute. In this world non-tangible employee shills and competencies increase in value. Employees also put more work into peer collaboration, not just completing tasks as assigned by their managers.

Connectbeam take: Directionally, this is a change in the world of work. It's still early for this to be a trend yet. But as companies slowly look at the new ways to handle talent management, these observations ring true. Social software, that facilitates and captures these non-tangible aspects of collaboration, is a great tool for helping in this regard.

Slide 14: How Work Really Gets Done

This slide notes that "new forms of leadership are required", with the ability to work within a network of people becoming much more important than discharging one's duties as required by one's position in the company hierarchy.

Connectbeam take: Hierarchies aren't going away, and they have a rightful place in terms of focusing the troops and ensuring common understanding of strategies. But they have also historically been the only way for work to get done. The cultural change of putting employees more in control over how strategies are achieved and leveraging one another's skills and knowledge is what has changed. It's a basis for companies to benefit from the whole knowledge of employees, not just what they know for a specific task.

Slide 23: Making the Invisible Visible

Drawing on the work of University of Virginia Professor Rob Cross, about whom we blogged recently, Knowledge Infusion points out the value of employee network analysis. In the example presented, the person at the top of the hierarchical chain actually has very limited connections to employees within the business unit. However, one employee appears to be a central enabler, despite being much lower in the organizational hierarchy. This employee connects many of the other employees. Loss of this central connector would present a significant disruption in collaboration.

Connectbeam take: This finding is one that probably resonates strongly with employees. They know of that person is so instrumental to connecting people for work. The same principle likely applies to information as well. Certain employees provide some of the most accessed information, and clearly are instrumental to the flow of knowledge inside the organization. Because colleagues' engagement with this information is invisible, it may be hard to know which employees are delivering the most useful content.

Slide 25: The Evolution of Talent Management

Here is what talent management entails, per Knowledge Infusion:

• Process support
• Recruiting
• Performance management
• Compensation management
• Succession planning
• Learning

The evolution of that work is the wrapping of social software tools - wikis, blogs, conversation tools - around that process. Building on the combination of traditional talent management work and these new tools, human resources professionals gain the following benefits:

1. Employee engagement
2. Informal learning
3. Customer engagement
4. Rapid time-to-productivity
5. Speed time-to-market
6. Social network analysis

Connectbeam take: The list of benefits are spot-on. It's interesting that Knowledge Infusion came up with these in relation to human resources. We've long believed that these benefits apply to most departments within organizations. Being part of an overall talent management strategy makes sense to us.

Slide 39: Identifying the Risks with Enterprise Social Software

Knowledge Infusion surveyed companies to find out what concerned them most with use of enterprise social software. Here are the results:

• Sensitive data and information become exposed or getting outside the company (56.7%)
• Nascent market of technology vendors that are still unproven and immature (37.7%)
• Employees wasting time/not doing their job (35.9%)
• The technology becoming obsolete or outdated quickly (27.7%)

Connectbeam take: Governance and productivity in the realm of enterprise social software is something we've discussed herebefore. The risks of employees inadvertently sharing sensitive information are a real issue. Consider it terms of risks. First, the information is made accessible internally, not out on the public web. What is the likelihood that someone will reveal sensitive info that way? Probably not too different from current email risks. To prevent data sharing for the possibilitythat something sensitive will be revealed means all the benefits of open data accessibility and collaboration are foregone. How bad is the risk of internal exposure of sensitive data?

As for the nascent market for technology vendors, one approach is to use installed versions vs. hosted. Installed lets each company maintain control over its data. If companies use cloud vendors, always available downloads of company information can mitigate concerns.

Enterprise 2.0 Is an Important Part of Human Capital Management

Forrester analyst Craig Symons noted the following with regard to human capital management:

Today, more than 85% of a typical S&P 500 company's market value is the result of intangible assets. For many companies, the bulk of these intangible assets is its people, its human capital. It is no longer what you own that counts but what you know.

Talented people are found throughout the different locations and business units of organizations. Giving them a chance to be found and to more broadly advance company operations is good for the enterprise, and good for the employees. Social software is a key enabler for this.

Putting the Social into Microsoft Outlook

"E-mail. No-one thinks of it as a social app. It's hardly what we think of as Web 2.0, yet it's the most social piece of software most of us use each day."

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw's observation is spot-on. If you were to survey companies today, you'd find that nothing compares to email as the application most actively used by employees. Not wikis, not blogs, not social networks, not anything.

One can abstract out the social aspects of email to see why it is the most social application inside the company:

• Contacts = social graph
• Email threads = online interactions
• Embedded links = information sharing
• Attached documents = content collaboration
• Search = findability and recall

While the next generation of software applications lend themselves significantly better to providing these social characteristics, email will continue to be a dominant form of communication, interaction and sharing in the years ahead. And there are plenty of other uses for email that nothing else can really replace. As Irwin Lazar wrote on the Enterprise 2.0 blog, "let's face it, we aren't giving up email."

Email is the most comprehensive record of employees' social graph, and it's where employees will turn for interactions. So what are some smart ways to leverage that?

Connectbeam Social Profiles Integrated into Microsoft Outlook

Through Spotlight Connect for Outlook, employees' Connectbeam Social Profiles are embedded into every internal email. Here's a screen shot of this integration:

  

What we've put in this profile is the following:

• Contact information, synchronized with LDAP or Active Directory
• Expertise - as created and managed by each employee
• Projects - as created and managed by each employee
• Recent Activity - content created across different social software apps plus bookmarks
• Employee profile toggling - click another email recipient name, see their profile

The social profile makes it easy to see what colleagues are doing and what they know, all at a glance from the Microsoft Outlook inbox.

Leverage Attention to Improve Awareness

The idea is to leverage the attention people give to their inbox and their contacts there. As we wrote in the January 2009 Connect Newsletter, people look to their close contacts first for information. Certainly this is a connections silo that Enterprise 2.0 needs to break, but it's also an opportunity to improve the way in which valuable information is distributed within the organization.

The Connectbeam social profile updates throughout the day as employees go about the work they do anyway. No extra effort is needed to keep the profiles updated. And the activities - bookmarks, wiki entries, blog entries, etc. - are provided as links so others who see something of interest can scan them themselves.

Email Context Extends Employees' Information Connections

An useful dynamic of emails is that recipients can include those who are one's close contacts, as well as colleagues with whom one is less familiar. This becomes the basis for enabling workers to access information beyond the recurring set of people with whom they interact.

Emails are wonderful for providing specific context. The sender has a purpose for composing the email, and an understanding for why others would find it relevant.

Tapping this context is valuable. Whereas an employee might not scan information for a distant connection normally, in the context of an email, there is heightened interest in what others on that email may be doing. That's the moment you're looking for.

With the Connectbeam social profile integrated into Outlook, colleagues become more than a name on the email list. They have a set of activities and declared expertise and projects. Since they are on the same email with one's close conneciton, this information becomes more relevant.

By matching a wider and deeper amount of information about a person to a contextually relevant moment of considering an email, companies have a natural way to foster stronger and more diverse connections among workers.

See for Yourself

To wrap things up, you can check out the demo below which shows how Connectbeam's integration with Microsoft Outlook works (running time 4:41):

Why Use a Jet Engine When a Feather Will Do?

We enjoyed ourselves at the KM World Expo. Nice to get out of the office, meet companies working on their own social initiatives and see what other vendors are dong. In a conversation with one visitor to our booth, an interesting use case came up.

Connectbeam maintains a unique Social Profile for each employee. These profiles let people identify their skills, interests and projects, and include the information they have shared and created. Through out-of-the-box connectors and APIs, these Social Profiles can be incorporated into a number of enterprise applications, including portals. In addition, these Social Profiles are the basis for employee searches.

Our booth visitor was intrigued by this, but asked about this use case: Assume a number of people inside an organization include "Lotus Notes" in their list of skills. Some are help desk staffers others are architects and designers. What happens when employees forget their passwords, and search the company Social Profiles for "lotus notes"? Wouldn't a Lotus Notes developer get bombarded with requests for password resets?

We talked about a couple scenarios.

The Jet Engine Scenario

First, imagine a system where the Social Profiles tapped into an Issue Tracker system. This system records all requests for password resets, and which employees closed them out. From this, a list of Lotus Notes password reset gurus could be developed. The Social Profiles tap into this intelligence to identify who the go-to people are for password resets.

And it addresses the problem of the Lotus Notes developer who shouldn't be bombarded with password reset requests.

It would take a special algorithm built inside the Issue Tracker app to generate these results. The Issue Tracker would integrate to the Social Profiles, and update them for the new skills an employee has. The custom code and integration on the Issue Tracker app would need to be maintained and incorporated into any upgrades...

Yeah, pretty daunting isn't it?

The Feather Scenario

Or, there's a simpler way to tackle the problem. A Lotus Notes developer simply adds this to his profile:

** I do not reset Lotus Notes passwords. Please call x1234 for those requests. Thank you. **

Problem solved.

We love social software. Give people the tools, and you'll be amazed what they can come up with.

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.

Research Shows Majority of Fastest Growing Companies Are Adopting Social Media

ReadWriteWeb recently reported on a follow-on study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This research into social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of social media nearly doubled in 2008 from what it was in 2007. Now 77% of respondents report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.

I was especially pleased to see than social networking topped the list on familiarity over online video, blogging, message boards, wikis, and podcasting. It was also on top in 2007. Consistent with this social networking also top the list on usage in 2008, moving up from third in 2007. Last year “don’t use any” was the top category. Now don’t use any” is fifth, only barely beating podcasting. Asked to rate importance for business strategy, 44% said very important and 34% said somewhat important. This is all good news for social media and is consistent with prior research.

It was also interesting to see that while 11.6% of Fortune 500 companies currently have a public blog, 39% of the Inc. 500 companies are blogging. This is not surprising as these smaller firms are often more progressive.

I found this study through Keith De La Rue who writes the blog AcKnolwedge Consulting for the Australian firm by that name. I found his blog as Keith linked to my post on Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies. There is a nice coverage of enterprise 2.0 on AcKnolwedge Consulting blog.

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.

Defining Aspects of Social Computing, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, and the Consumer Web

Susan Scrupski and Jevon MacDonald are working on a model that breaks apart aspects of the new web world, inside and outside the enterprise. See Susan’s Circles of Expertise in 2.0 for Biz post for the current model. The four areas as range for digital marketing and mass collaboration (or co-creation) to social media and enterprise 2.0.

Connectbeam is squarely in the enterprise 2.0 space and I think these types of distinctions are important to develop. It helps to avoid the confusions that can arise over issues like the role of Facebook in the enterprise that I have written about on this blog. Susan writes, “Although there is overlap among all these groups, the areas of focus are distinctly unique. Of course, businesses can benefit by incorporating the expertise from all these areas, but they’d need to source it separately.”

It will be interesting to see where this model goes. I would bring the connection between enterprise 2.0 and mass collaboration a bit closer than the current model depicts since this mass collaboration can, and should, occur within the enterprise as well as out on the web as a whole through projects like Cisco I-Prize. One of the benefits of a social networking tool that combines social bookmarking like Connectbeam, is that we can help with this mass collaboration by getting the right people together inside the enterprise to more effective engage in this collaboration. Susan and Jevon are inviting contributions to their evolving model in this shared space.

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.

Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies

Zach Thomas of Forrester recently came out with a report, Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, which stated that enterprise social networking applications are an emerging trend. Assisting on the report were Paul Hamerman, Claire Schooley, Charlene Li, and Meghan Donnelly. Zach added that many business processes could benefit from these applications. He wrote in the summary, “savvy human resources (HR) professionals are taking the lead and using them for recruiting, alumni programs, mentoring, learning, collaboration, and connecting people across the entire organization. They understand that corporate social networks are not a replacement for human interactions; this technology should augment — not replace — existing process automation apps, and they will need broad internal support for their initiatives to succeed.”

This has been a theme at Connectbeam and we are pleased to see these conclusions from Forrester. The report begins with a section titled, “professional networks are the backbone of business.” I could not agree more. He points out that collaboration translates into innovation, strong personal ties increase employee retention and they help with sales. He added that failure to establish a means to support this networking can result in lost knowledge when someone leaves, difficulties in finding the right people to help with pressing business challenges, failure to optimize relationships across geographies, and disappointment in younger workers who experience these networks outside work and expect them to be provided on the job. These younger employees may then turn to consumer web tools that are not designed to support business functions (see The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise) and will only operate in silos of the subset who might engage with them.

Zach offers a number of useful HR related applications for social networking applications in the report. It is nice to see Forrester continue to cover enterprise 2.0 and social networking. They predicted in an earlier report on the enterprise web 2.0 market that social networking applications will make up the largest share of the $4.6 billion that enterprises will be spending on enterprise web 2.0 applications by 2013 (see Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?).

Zach divides the corporate social networking software market providers into three groups: targeted solution providers, adjacent solution providers, and platform players such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Connectbeam is included in his list of targeted solution providers and points out that we operate behind the firewall. We feel this offers greater security, control, and integration into company IT infrastructure than operating out in the cloud. Zach predicts that larger established application vendors will lag behind innovators in this space. At the same time, he predicts that many firms will stay with established tools such as Sharepoint as the market matures. This is one reason we recently announced our Sharepoint integration. He concludes with the good advice to align social networking tools with pressing business problems.

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..

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.

The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise: A Post Script

In my one of my last posts, Should Facebook Be Banned from Work?, I sided with Gartner analyst Nikos Drakos over Gartner's Ray Valdes on the debate as to whether Facebook should be banned from the enterprise. Nikos argued for banning it. What I was attempting to convey was the difference between using social media with confidence within the enterprise versus doing it in public space. Banning is a bit draconian as Facebook can serve useful purposes in a business context. It is simply important to understand its proper role within a work environment.

I do not think the debate was asking the right question. Facebook is a consumer oriented networking tool that is increasingly being adopted by business people as a social networking tool for business purposes. In this way it is like a “virtual social event or other recreational activity” that can be effectively used for business networking. I would not ban my sales force from attending social events in the real world with customers during business hours if this activity has the potential to lead to sales or helps with customer relations. But if my salesperson goes to social events in the real world every day or surfs Facebook all day and does not make any sales, I might “ban” that person. In the end you need to use good judgment.

You should ask yourself if you are using Facebook appropriately for business purposes during business time? Even that is a bit of gray area. Since most of us work outside business hours, we also, at times, take care of personal issues during work hours. So I do not see any harm connecting with friends through Facebook on what to do after work during work hours if you are getting your work done. I do not ban Facebook at my company but I expect people to use good judgment and I trust my employees to do this.

I think the more important question is what social networking tools are right for your business. In this case I would pick a tool that is designed for business use, and not one designed for recreational use and built to generate high traffic.

Should Facebook Be Banned from Work? Gardner’s Nikos Drakos versus Ray Valdes

Facebook has taken over from blogs to become the poster child for consumer social media with over 68 million users. Many of the consumer web 2.0 tools, including blogs, have successfully migrated to the workplace. At the same a huge industry have emerged to create business versions of these consumer tools. Many of these business tools have taken features of the consumer tools and combined them for greater business effectiveness. This is our strategy at Connectbeam, combining social bookmarking with social networking and adding business focused features.

Where does Facebook fit into this picture? A recent debate at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 on April 7 was summarized on eWeek. Gartner analyst Nikos Drakos took the position that Facebook should be banned, while Gartner's Ray Valdes defended the social network, saying it should be regulated. Drakos essentially said that Facebook is a distraction from company business and increases the liability for disclosure of inappropriate and inconsistent company information. Valdes counters that company regulations can govern these inappropriate uses.

This debate can take emotional turns given the high loyalty to Facebook. However, we have to remember the question, Should Facebook Be Banned from Work? It is not should social media be banned from work. Facebook is a consumer tool designed to maximize its marketing revenue. Facebook has opened up its APIs for third party developers and unleashed a gold rush in widget development. However, these widgets are not generally designed for business and they often broadcast information without the user’s realization.

Let’s look at Facebook's Beacon experiment as an example the business implications of Facebook’s goal of maximize its marketing revenue. Here is a nice summary of the transitions and back pedaling, The Evolution of Facebook’s Beacon, from the New York times Bits blog. The problem comes from the tracking of your actions on sites other than Facebook and then putting what happens in your news feed that goes out to all your Facebook friends. Like many people I am not excited for this information to be distributed without my control. While I have nothing to hide, I see this as just clutter that can be spam to my Facebook friends.

The problem and outcry occurred because Facebook made it very hard to control this feature. Despite numerous protests, Facebook refused for a while to allow for a universal opt off capability. You had to disallow each broadcast separately. It was also unclear how to do this nor did you have much time to make the stop before it went out. The reason for this initial disregard of user’s wishes lies in Facebook’s desire for the increased ad revenue that could come through this feature. This unattended broadcast can occur with many of the other Facebook widgets. They can be worse that the email “reply all” button.

Why would you want to give a tool designed to generate consumer eyeballs and increase its marketing revenue room to operate freely in your business? I am a Facebook fan and a user but I would rather have social media tools that are designed for business use operating within my enterprise. I think that regulation is the wrong approach. Why pick a tool that requires such regulation? Regulation is the exact antithesis of Web 2.0. I do not think we should confuse Facebook with all of social media. To ban Facebook in your business is not to ban social media. There are many social media tools that offer the networking capabilities similar to those within Facebook. I have to side with Nikos on this one.

I added a more on the topic in this post, The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise: A Post Script, where I did say there could be a role for Facebook in an enterprise and we do not ban it here at Connectbeam. The post explains why.

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).

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.