Byrne Tony Byrne

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Social as a Service, not an Application

30-Mar-2010

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Services Oriented Architecture, SharePoint 2010

I recently had the opportunity to publish in Information Management magazine some thoughts on collaboration and social computing architectures for larger enterprises. Find the article here.

To quote:

    For many customers, initial success with community and collaboration solutions has inevitably led to the old problem of multiple silos of information, services, and user experiences. First, the quality of search applications erodes quickly. Then employees start to get confused by isolated and disconnected application services, such as multiple profiles, activity streams, tag sets, discussion forums, and so forth...

There are serious sociological challenges to improving the way teams network and collaborate in large, distributed work environments. I think as an industry we're starting to get a better sense for the technical challenges as well. (Other analysts and consultants -- like Dion Hinchcliffe, Mike Gotta, Oliver Marks, and others -- have been publishing some important thoughts on this topic.) Right now, I believe most vendors have not yet caught up to where many of their larger customers want them to be.

For a deeper critique of individual vendor offerings, you can consult our Collaboration and Community Software vendor evaluations.

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