What social networking vendors offer, for businesses…

The social networking scene has taken the web by storm as Blogger, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace and countless others expand peoples’ reach way beyond their physical community to realms that span across cyberspace.

It so easy.

People create a profile and voilà!

They’re set to share content, ideas and opinions.

Social networking, especially for those who know their way around, is insanely cool. It’s no surprise that so many organizations are looking to setup their own, internally. Once a business social network is up and running, if it’s done right, employees and managers can connect among themselves with ease.

One theory, with regards to business social networks, is that good ideas get validated and bad ideas get discarded more quickly, which leads to faster product development — but it’s just a theory.

In general, companies will benefit, in various ways, from the content that’s being created, shared, added upon and archived for later use.

Any company can make social networking yield benefits but like most new things, it would be foolish to attempt to qualify its financial bottomline usefulness with hard metrics. For the time being, it’s more a matter of getting in early than trying to catch up, later on.

So assuming you’re ready to launch your internal social network, which solution should you choose? Well, that’s for the IT guys to decide but to get the ball rolling, consider the following vendors…

• Drupal
  • Open source.
  • Great at community-driven sites.
  • Blogs and profiles.
• IBM Lotus Connections
  • Paid software.
  • Helps you execute tasks more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers
  • Blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, communities and more.
• Jive Software
  • Licensed software or hosted SaaS.
  • Integrates the “enterprise 2.0″ capabilities of collaboration software, community software and social networking software.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, tags, discussions and more.
• MS-SharePoint
  • Paid server software, MS SaaS or hosted by 3rd parties.
  • In its own words: connecting people, process and information.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles and communities.
• NewsGator
  • Paid software. Extends MS-SharePoint.
  • Empower employees, customers and partners to collaborate, communicate, and innovate in order to create business value through social computing.
  • SharePoint add-ons for tags, tag clouds, expert search, discussions and more.
• Scuttle
  • Open source.
  • Light on the more advanced features but does social bookmarking like it should.
  • Social bookmarking.
• Socialtext
  • Paid hosted service or on-location server appliance.
  • Used for all employees to get a collective view of what’s going on and share content.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks and microblogging.
• Telligent
  • Lease the software or buy perpetual licenses.
  • Designed for high-volume communities where performance and up-time are critical.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, groups and communities, social analytics and more.

And as you continue searching for vendors, expect to find lots of other worthwhile finds. Keep in mind that the big software firms are currently being swarmed by waves of smaller firms offering solid codesets and eye-pleasing visuals so expect the heated competition to go on, for a while.

In case you were just thinking about this…

Yes, open source has an advantage over most paid and hosted solutions: it’s free!

It’s also instantly available through a simple download and there’s no licensing fee, whatsoever. If you can make up for a little less “business-class support”, open source scripts will likely end up being your first and all-time best choice. Keep in mind open source projects evolve all the time and all those upcoming updates will also be… free. Which is nice.

And don’t forget that open source projects usually come with mountains of useful plug-ins which add bleeding edge features to your core script. Plus the fact you can dive right into your code and tweak just about anything you want. No encryption here.

But perhaps open source is not your thing.

If that’s your case, paid scripts (or software) or hosted solutions is where you’ll most likely end up as very few organizations develop their own social networking engine from scratch.

With such solutions, the deeper your pockets, the more features you’ll get.

And you’re not too picky, customizationwise, you’ll be up and running rather quickly. Software as a service (or “Saas”) is where many mid-sized companies like to do business because everything’s hosted externally. There can be some cost saving at first but as the content volume grows, it can inflate the rent to the point where it’s not that much of a deal anymore so watch out for that. Do your mathematical projections before you sign-up.

Paid software is generally hosted in-house and it’s generally yours for life but remember that the upgrades might cost you a lot of dough, over and above all the other technical maintenance cost. Again, do your mathematical projections before rearranging your server room to accomodate a business social networking software solution.

If you still feel anxious about deploying a social network in your enterprise, seek help from the vendors themselves or from local IT firms which specialize in web 2.0 stuff.

All in all, if your organization is still unsure about wether it’s worth it to have an internal social network, consider that employees will get access to blogs, wikis and tools that let them communicate, collaborate and share information.

The real bottom-line question might be, how much is it worth, to your enterprise, to have its employees using applications it controls and manages? Once that question is answered, everything else aligns itself accordingly.

Tags: social networking, social networks, internal networks, company social network, enterprise, business, social networking vendors, ibm, lotus, jive, sharepoint, saas, hosted solutions, paid software, .net, microsoft, blogs, wikis, search, information, connect, share, content, server

Social networking in business

Networking isn’t new.

Social networking is the online equivalent of a offline meeting where, among other things, geography and schedules wouldn’t matter. Now, that’s a weird concept for some C-level dinosaurs but for the tech-savvy managers moving up, it makes perfect sense.

At the very foundation of networking, there are two things: humans and communications.

In a business setting, a basic goal would be for ideas to be clearly communicated, among all “humans”, in the organization. A more advanced goal would be for those ideas to mature and turn into “value”, one way or another.

Blogs and wikis haven’t replaced email messages and chatting but they’ve definitely added shared spaces where project data (and ideas) can more easily pollinate, more often than not, in ways that were largely unpredictable. Putting the information “out there”, for an entire team (or company) to see is a powerful way to leverage teamwork.

Social networking for businesses see communities of interest spring up around subject matters rather than organizational hierarchies. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re well aware that the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the “top brass”. Networking at all levels of a company smashes the invisible glass walls which have the bad habit of strangling innovation, big time.

Generally speaking, social applications provide business value by letting people add context to information stores which, in turn, helps others identify what’s useful to them — it also makes search results that much more relevant.

Social bookmarks are a nice example of this since team members can share the web resources they like and learn from others about web destinations that have been overlooked. After a while, the bookmark list becomes a real time saver.

Naturally, enterprise social networking helps people find and connect with co-workers through user profiles, expert search and social graphs that map out any employee’s connections throughout the organization. This, in and of itself, makes for a strong argument for social networking, in the modern workplace.

Finding co-workers with domain-specific knowledge, in just a few clicks, can really propel any organization to a whole new level of communications, productivity, teamwork and of course, profitability.

Some organizations are obsessed with the “dangers of wasting time” wrongly associated with social networking. But that’s very bad management since social networking is a communications enabler and as such, it’s built to help channel information to the right people, wherever the people may be in the organizational chart.

If you’re just starting out in the social networking for business “adventure”, make sure to take a look at the quality open source scripts that are available to structure your data into blogs, forums, wikis or just about any other way you wish.

Tags: social networking, enterprise, business, work, workplace, colleagues, co-workers, employees, team members, managers, c-level, executives, decisions, ideas, communications, information, organization, open source, blogs, wikis

Novell picks up on Just enough operating system

Let’s start by taking care of the semantics where “Just enough operating system” is generally referred to as “JeOS” or “Juice”, for the really wired crowd.

Yes, JeOS is pronounced “Juice”, like in the juice you drink.

So what’s JeOS, anyway?

Glad you asked, it refers to a customized OS that precisely fits the needs of a particular application. Huh? Simply said, it’s the opposite of a bloated, one-size-fits-all operating system. It’s a base OS with (or without) specific pieces of it, like a MySQL engine, for instance.

JeOS is all about optimization, speed and lightweightedness.

In this age of information, data can explode and setting up lightweight server appliances can ease administration, lower the latency times (associated with queries) and reduce the risk with operating such an appliance.

If you only install the part of the OS that you need (for a specific server appliance), you’re likely to build up a the fastest possible server for a given task (for that level of computing power). So who’s picking up on the JeOS craze? It’s basically a Linux thing with Ubuntu leading the way, VMWare integrating it in its virtual machine matrix and for the very companies, Novell which is adding its weight to the JeOS scene.

In fact, Novell’s new SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 adds capability for policy-driven systems management and, on top of that, it’ll soon be certified to run on Amazon EC2 and as more coders are jumping in the cloud, daily, that’s clearly a smart move.

But that’s not all since, later this year, Novell plans to release tools that let a company (or developer) build a virtual appliance using only the parts of SUSE Linux needed to run an application, stripping out the rest to create that contextually ideal lightweight package.

Of course, Novell hopes the JeOS moniker sticks and more companies adopt this “building block approach” to operating systems management.

Tags: novell, jeos, juice, ubuntu, server, server appliance, os, operating system, virtual appliance, suse linux, linux, enterprise, systems management, amazon ec2, cloud computing, lightweight os, vmware, server edition jeos, just enough os

Concerns over enterprise uses of P2P

End-users already know how powerful a peer-to-peer (P2P) network can be when data needs to be shared, especially across large groups.

To better understand how people can make proper use of P2P networks, consider User A who creates something interesting, let’s say it’s a nicely laid out document on “how to install an air conditioning unit in a window”. That information is likely to be useful to a whole lot of other people so User A makes it available (for free) to anyone who wants it through a P2P community, using software such LimeWire, BitTorrent, Morpheus or eMule.

The more people share this document, the more easily available it become through the P2P community, thus spreading the load (cost of bandwidth or CPU time, mainly) across more and more end-users. It’s a very smart way to distribute data which can encompass anything digital, including music, videos and code.

So this kind of network is likely to appeal to enterprise users but since the data used at the office is likely to be more sensitive than the stuff from home, IT Security admins need to assess the P2P threat before the problems occur.

Instead of banning P2P networks altogether, companies should educate their users and show them how to use these networks without putting the company and its data at risk of being leaked to outsiders.

Why is P2P so important for companies?

Well, because of its architecture, P2P networking is a good way to run apps across shared computing resources and share public data. P2P is often employed in research, education and bioinformatics. In business environments, it has potential for file sharing and collaboration while providing major efficiencies in storage and CPU power.

Assuming the IT Security people have put the appropriate policies and controls in place, P2P is a faster, cheaper way of sharing media files and by all means, that’s a growing requirement in many companies who may even find it useful to develop custom P2P apps to cover their specific data distribution needs.

While file systems may be exposed by inattentive users, properly configured company firewalls should be able to stop illegal data movements. The greater risk comes from laptops sharing data over P2P networks outside the company firewall so that’s where the education part becomes so vital to the overall security of a company’s data.

As long as companies monitor P2P usage (within their firewall’s realm) and the networks (from the “outside world”), there should be less risk of embarrassing data leaks, copyright or privacy violations.

Tags: p2p, peer-to-peer, networks, enterprise, data, leaks, privacy, companies, it

Time to break down the corporate silos

In the modern enterprise, information technology is an enabler for more productive collaboration between all departments, units and workers.

At a time when key performance indicators (or KPIs) should be readily available for all information workers and especially the C-level, it seems too many decisions are still taken without a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure and projects.

So even if IT could deliver awesome “dashboards”, ripe with timely and highly readable information, it seems way too many companies fail to tear down their corporate silos to produce such data.

The advantages of overcoming the silo approach makes it possible to envision a much better understanding of the company, as a whole. For instance, in an “un-siloed” company using , the IT department can get much better “real time” information so to anticipate (and resolve) the problems instead of merely reacting to them.

Having some kind of central repository, most likely gathering data from many sources, makes so much sense because to be able, in a single window, to identify [for instance] the performance of critical systems and projects in real time empowers people to act on things, way before problems occur.

It seems straightforward enough to work as a company-wide team but still, too many companies force their employees to rely on manual extrapolation of multiple applications, each containing silos of critical data, to go about their daily work. At best, this results in hit-or-miss decision making and a dangerous slide towards a certain inertia. At worst, working from flawed assumptions leads to significant costs, delays and wasted resources.

Retrofitting portal software to pull together solied data can help but overall, it does little to correlate information into useful guidance. In regards to software destined to enterprises of all sizes looking to implement dashboards, inquire with vendors such as BMC, Oracle, CA, Hewlett-Packard and IBM who are melding business service management (BSM), business intelligence (BI) as well as project and portfolio management (PPM) tools into overall dashboards.

Expect implementation and integration to be somewhat demanding while customization is plain inevitable (call it a “technical challenge”). This complex work might involve SOAP or XML bridges, especially if your application infrastructure isn’t homogeneous.

The payoff for such a bold transformative project towards dashboards mainly resides in the newfound ability to have largely useless data chunks (when taken individually) suddenly provide highly correlative insight, from all the data collected.

If your company isn’t using dashboards yet, now is probably a goodtime to break down those antiquated corporate silos to create infinite value from your various data sources.

Tags: dashboards, corporate silos, bsm, bi, ppm, kpi, it, critical data, information, enterprise