Many commentators compare Drive with Dropbox and to some extent Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, you should remember that you have many, many more choices.

On the face of it, most such services appear similar. They usually provide:

• Space for storing files (free up to a limit and then for-pay based on tiers)
• Syncing files with your various devices so you can access them on the move

However, once you move beyond the "mine is bigger than yours" debate, you will notice there are subtle differences among these services.

At a high level, I see four categories of services here:

1. Consumer oriented: Services like iCloud, Dropbox, and SugarSync are really focused on end users and have built some differentiating features. Dropbox, for example even has a Linux client and SugarSync allows you to sync any folder on your desktop and not just the one dedicated folder that most other services mandate.
    
2. File shares with document creation: Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive fall in this category. They are still focused on end consumers but allow more than just file sharing and storage. With Drive, you can edit and create documents using Google Docs, while with SkyDrive, you can access Microsoft Office WebApps.
    
3. Enterprise Focused: This category includes services like Box, Huddle, Oxygen, Citrix ShareFile, Glasscubes, Skydox and many others. These really focus on the enterprise segment. Box (like most others in this category) for example, provides granular controls for administrators to maintain access control for files and directories.
    
4. File shares with light collaboration: This category includes tools such as Alfresco and eXo which have traditionally focused on other enterprise needs (Alfresco does Document Management while eXo is a Portal platform), but have now started offering a cloud service that has some bit of file sharing. You could also consider SharePoint Online / Office365 in this camp.  These tools, however, typically lack advanced capabilities, such as file sync across devices.

Doubtless some of these services could be placed into multiple categories, and some will eventually evolve to provide services focused on more than one category.

But if you are an enterprise evaluating these sort of services for your needs, remember to look beyond the hype. Our forthcoming Cloud File Share evaluation research will look at such issues more closely and provide detailed evaluations of these vendors. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback on these categories, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

To date, the native gamification functionality in Jive (even in the latest version 5.0) was very limited, with basic functionality you would expect in such tools going missing.

The Bunchball add-on is meant to plug such gaps, ideally increasing adoption and engagement of the social network. Users can be awarded points for different actions (e.g., comment on documents, write a blog, answer questions) they perform in the Jive-Bunchball powered social networks, with points getting tallied in different ways (leader boards, status levels).  In theory this is supposed to spur collaboration.

In our evaluation of Jive software in the Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software research stream, we note that Jive is known to OEM third party modules in its platform at a fast pace and swap them out at an even faster pace. Jive is sticking to the script. Much before the current announcement and as early as October 2011, a similar app "Nitro for Jive" had been available. Details and documentation are still scarce, but the new, new module seems to be the next version of the older app.

The jury may still be out on gamification and its merits, but enterprises looking to experiment should note that this is an optional module that costs extra license fees and most likely some custom development to work it into your applications.

It's also worth mentioning that similar Bunchball modules to gamify your social network are available for IBM Connections and Salesforce Chatter as well.

At the NAB show, futurist Marina Gorbis talked about the seismic shifts taking place in the world of content creation and used examples of installation art pieces to illustrate trends like algorithmic content and non-human content creation.

Exhibit 1 is what I call "real-time fashion". In 1998, artist Nancy Paterson created a stock market skirt . Economists say there is a relationship between the stock market and fashion fluctuations. If the market is doing well, the skirt length reduces and if the markets are floundering, the length increases. The installation art consists of the mannequin Judy, a computer, several display monitors, and a mechanical system of motors, cables and pulleys. Some Perl scripts analyzed online stock quotes, and the skirt length adjusted accordingly.

"Painting the town LED" is Exhibit 2. In Erik Krikortz's art project Emotional Cities, the aggregated responses to "How are you feeling today" are used to light up a city's skyscrapers and serve to illumine the city's zeitgeist. You'll recognize the more prosaic version of this as "sentiment analysis" which is increasingly being added to marketers' tool kit.

Not mentioned by Gorbis but Exhibit 3 is "Writing on the wall". The Think Exhibition at New York's Lincoln Center to commemorate IBM's centenary consisted of a 123 feet long data visualization wall, which displayed dynamic patterns based on data feeds from the city's traffic, pollution, and sunshine indicators. The art on display was not a Da Vinci, but perhaps a Fibonacci.

Conventional notions of what constitutes art get challenged in these explorations. Similarly in an age of convergence, boundaries blur and traditional categorizations like platforms and channels can crumble.

Metadata so far has been operating in a linear, unidimensional fashion and has been helping make only basic connections and discovery for us. Are our information models, sense-making apparatus, and systems (and yes, even our own evaluations) ready for this brave beautiful world of multi-dimensional interconnectedness? What do we need to get ready?

Welcome your comments below...

Of course, one of the most satisfying parts of building with Lego is the interoperability of the parts, the way they snap together with a real feeling of rigidity. You can mix and match parts from different kits to create your own designs whenever inspiration takes you. I do wonder whether if that's why I took to being a developer with great enthuiasm.

A few weeks ago, before the London weather decided to bring us a year's rainfall in less than a week, I spent a sunny weekday lunchtime catching up with an old colleague. Before long, conversation turned -- as it generally does with nerds -- to development. One thing that came up in that discussion stuck with me: "I wish people would remember that APIs are not Lego."

Software vendors are very fond of APIs. So fond that they often see the mere existence of an API in their product as a fait accompli in and of itself. However, what this really means in practical terms is, "We're giving you a way of making our product work with others you might already own employing code you'll to have to build and maintain yourself. Oh, and it's going to be pretty-much proprietary. Maybe you'd like to buy some training?"

Not only are APIs certainly not like Lego, they are not equal. Talk to a developer and you'll find out pretty quickly that they range from the well-formed and functional to the fiendishly complex and arcane. Then ask about the documentation. Then probably buy them a beer to recover from having to relive personal nightmares.

The chances are that every piece of software you purchase is going to have to work with a range of others that you already own. Unlike Lego, they won't snap together simply. You'll have to tease them in place via an integration.

The good news is that you probably know well in advance how you like this to work at a business process level -- e.g., content from System A should be sent to System B under circumstances XYZ --- long before you start any purchase cycle. This should become one of your test scenarios that you can subsequently use to help decide which supplier offers the best  technical fit. (Vendor fit is another thing.)

So when you ask "How?" and a prospective supplier answers with, "...via our extensive range of APIs," be sure to request documentation to illustrate their answer. And then validate with developers or with your systems integrator. 

Whilst accidentally treading on a Lego brick in bare feet is one of life's more painful experiences, relying on an unknown and untested API to meet a critical need to your business can bring about much more lasting pain...

We recommend that you make Content Migration a part of your overall project and start planning for it from the very outset. This will allow you analyze your content and make improvements to overall content quality. You will also have better chance of keeping your project on track and avoid any major cost or schedule overruns.

In our recent advisory briefing, Start Your Content Migration Planning Early, we lay out what migration activities you need to plan or execute at each stage in a project, from team selection to piloting.

This advisory is for subscribers to our Collaboration, DAM, ECM, SharePoint, Search, CMS or Portals streams.

For more about content migration, you should also check out our earlier advisory, A Guide to Successful Content Migration in conjunction with this one.

The first part of the analysis summarizes seven key trends in this marketplace. Check out the press release describing those trends.

The second part of the analysis provides a 4D view of 22 vendors.

Slightly modifying what the ancient Greeks said, you cannot dip your finger twice in the same (activity) stream. There is a constant ferment of activity in the E2.0 space, and we try to capture the rate of change of both vendors and their products. This should give you a good sense for the relative riskiness of your technology choices and help you match the options that are right for your enterprise risk appetite and eliminate any nasty surprises for you down the road.

Let us know what you think.

On May 9, we'll be conducting a webinar that will answer those questions and shed light on:

• How you should think about cloud options for your technology solutions
• Creating a mobile strategy that actually improves, rather than hinders, the customer brand experience
• Why implementing social tools without a proper business strategy can lead to disastrous results

You can register for this free webinar here. 

This webinar will be a preview of many of the topics that we will be discussing in depth at this year's info360 conference. In NYC on June 12-14, we'll be presenting a number of sessions including:

Social Workplace Market Overview 2012

Keynote: Consumerization of IT

Acronym Soup: ECM, WCM, CMS, WEM, CEM, DAM Dissected

The Right Way to Select Enterprise Collaboration Technology

DAM (Digital Asset Management) 101

Understanding the Marketing Technologist Toolkit

How to Negotiate the Right Price for Enterprise Software

The Advance Rates to the conference are available until May 4. We look forward to seeing many of you in New York!

Now, you may remember that Atos is the largest enterprise to have publicly declared war on evil email (Imagine Atos top gun Thierry Breton, charging a la Popeye in The French Connection and thundering, “Get off the email and get on the Wall”). Atos wants to transition to email alternatives for all internal communications in three years.

As an aside, while debates continue about the wisdom of this zero-tolerance-for-email policy, I think it is pure marketing genius. Atos may have been Europe’s second largest IT Systems Integrator (behind Capgemini) and the IT partner for the Olympic games, but trailed its peers in brand awareness outside its core European markets. The no-email initiative has become a conversation starter;Atos gets free publicity and gains mindshare.

Back to blueKiwi. In last month’s update to our Enterprise 2.0 vendor evaluation research, we said “blueKiwi’s offering lies between the social platform Socialtext wishes to offer, and the ever-enticing notion of a modern replacement for email.” Done with explaining the acquisition rationale.

I am usually circumspect about M&A outcomes and certainly not a cheerleader for every deal that happens. Also, one can expect culture mismatches and different DNAs in integrator-vendor deals, but perhaps there is some merit to this particular marriage. It is a sign of Atos putting its money where its mouth is, if nothing else.  We can expect that Atos will put blueKiwi to work internally (seems the current Atos E2.0 arsenal consists of Office Communicator and a wiki).

In addition, blueKiwi could boost Atos' Smart Organization offerings (which are a mix of ECM + Collaboration software implementations with some consulting services on top). Don't be surprised though, if enterprises end up paying more (the overheads, consulting services) for any such offerings. So it's not quite au revoir. We can expect blueKiwi to have a semi-autonomous existence for a little while if only to honor existing customer commitments.

Existing customers should not have to head to the exit door right away but are well advised to have their plan B ready.

Of course, there will be a greater sense of urgency and a bigger question mark for SIs who either use blueKiwi (e.g. Capgemini, Atos biggest competitor) or have built offerings around blueKiwi (e.g. Logica who has an offering called Logica Integration built with the help of blueKiwi). Dassault Systems, blueKiwi's first client and early investor is said to have sold its stake and has launched its own social networking product now. You can expect some changes in the social software pecking order in Europe in the coming years.

Social software usage and adoption is innately tied to organizational culture and ethos. blueKiwi used to say that one of their successes has been to get even the reticent French to start using social networks. Two French proverbs perhaps provide a glimpse of the psyche

• "I have often regretted having spoken, but never for having not." - Philippe de Commynes
• "We were given speech to hide our thoughts." - Talleyrand

Though blueKiwi’s reach was strongest in native France and neighboring Germany, it was still the leading European vendor for social software. The likes of Jive software, which are hoping to expand globally, will now sense an opportunity but it won't be easy sailing as they have to crack the culture coda.

In other words, a predominantly micro-blogging oriented software without other collaboration oriented features / applications risks becoming a social ghetto. Yammer often becomes such a social silo today: employees can take notice of different conversations happening in the enterprise, but to act upon them and to get any meaningful work done, they have to shift to different applications / systems.  In short, easy to talk, harder to act.

Now, Yammer is taking baby steps towards enabling document-centric collaboration. It has acquired oneDrum, (a UK based company with less than 10 employees) for an application that lets multiple users edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files at the same time. According to a Techcrunch report, the oneDrum features will get added to Yammer in a few months time.  In theory the user experience for collaborative editing will go something like this: folders corresponding to your Yammer groups get created on your desktop and any edits you make to the files in the desktop will get synced to Yammer as well as your coworkers in those groups.

In this day of the cloud and GoogleDocs with their models of centrally hosted documents, a peer-to-peer fileshare model does feel a bit quaint. Certain questions about architecture, network capacity, security, and scalability also come to mind, but I'll hold them back until we see the product in action later this year.

Essentially, this acquisition signals Yammer's intent to break out of its silo and expand its footprint into the bigger world of enterprise collaboration, where documents, workflows, and business processes rule roost. That is already a crowded field with both

• Traditional collaboration vendors, who're busy applying fresh coats of social paint to their software
• Social platform / suite vendors, who also have a head start over Yammer in this respect

Only time will tell if Yammer can acquire new stripes and become a social software suite, but it won't be an easy transition.

To that end, Google has won a handful of big deals, but in discussions with some larger early adopters, a hype cycle appears to be playing out:

1. Customer leadership gets excited about "Cloud"
2. They make a big splash by outsourcing key functionality to Google Apps
3. It turns out later that Google's approach doesn't always work well for the entire enterprise
4. Customer quietly dials back to core GMail offering, plus perhaps a few related Apps

This hasn't happened to every large Google Apps customer -- and other vendors frequently hype their wares too -- but it has repeated itself in several cases.

This hype cycle most recently played out with City of Los Angeles, who as it turns out received a $250k discount to help sway others that Google could sweep large enterprises. I missed some of the fall-out that transpired during the winter holidays, but the intrepid Mary Jander did not. Read her detailed exposé here.

Subscribers to our Enteprise Collaboration & Social vendor evalutions know that Google's critical early architectural assumptions have bequeathed Apps with a legacy of suitability for some small- and medium-sized business scenarios, but also made it less amenable to major enterprises.

To be sure, Google Apps could present a good fit for you, especially if you crave GMail. But don't just "go Google" in some quixotic attempt to cloudify your business or wipe your aging IT investments away in one swoop. Consider Google Apps like you would any other vendor's offering -- which means: test first, test broadly, and test competitively against other solutions. Let us know if we can help.

Ms. Duncan suggested the exciting possibilities of their marriage: "Think of our child; with your brains and my body, what a wonder it would be."

Bernard Shaw replied, "Yes, but what if it had my body and your brains?"

As the tale of social vendor Socialcast illustrates, vendor M&A does not always deliver the best of both worlds either. To begin at the beginning...

The last few years have seen much jostling among social software vendors to become “twitter for the enterprise.” Early on, one of the contenders for this title was Socialcast, and its activity stream-oriented software found a fair bit of adoption among both small and large enterprises. The success of the company attracted a suitor in the form of VMware.

VMWare is of course the emperor of the virtualization world. VMware’s technology and products find favor with many enterprise IT departments, it has established relationships and deeper pockets (compared to the much smaller Socialcast), and itself was growing at a fast clip. Also, note that storage heavyweight EMC owns about 80% of VMware.  

So, in May 2011, when the acquisition of Socialcast by VMWare was announced, it was widely expected (and justifiably so) that Socialcast would be able to punch above its weight as it now had access to greater resources to support a real breakout.

However, after about a year, we wonder if that promise has been realized.

• The core product lumbers on with incremental (but not earth shattering) enhancements
• Progress on its social project management tool, "Strides," seems rather slow (originally conceived in 2010, announced in September 2011 but still in Beta)
• Tellingly, Socialcast does not find a mention in the product list on VMware website.

As the social software space matures and we see broader dispersion of product features and functionality, vendor intangibles become an increasingly important differentiator.  Our advice in all such situations may seem nothing more than common sense, but will stand you in good stead: get as much concrete detail as possible on product roadmaps, and do as much diligence on the vendor as you do on the technology.

Those are important topics, but I think an even bigger to-do for enterprises is to bring the right skill sets to bear. One key skill set to engage here is enterprise architecture.

If you examine the individual applications and platforms that employees access to complete work every day, you end up charting myriad of different systems in the typical enterprise. Some of these may be loosely aggregated within a portal, while others may not. The digital workplace concept, though, helpfully turns the table around by looking at it from the standpoint of the employee, rather than the enterprise. There's clearly an opportunity to apply well-known user experience methodologies -- such as User Centered Design (UCD) -- to improve your colleagues' effectiveness here.

But as you dig deeper into the employee digital experience, you'll discover more than just clunky, freestanding applications. You'll find:

• Information and process flows that span multiple systems
• Siloed data and content
• COTS vendors pushing their own separate mobile apps
• Diverse security and information access needs

Cataloging and understanding the business value of all these systems is the job of an enterprise architect. If you are trying to transform your digital workplace, then you'd do well to engage your enterprise architecture team -- you have one, right? -- in reconstructing the pieces into a greater whole.

Just remember that the point is not to re-arrange boxes and arrows to work your way forward from back-end systems to employees, but rather to re-arrange what happens on your colleagues' screens by working your way backwards. Is it too simple to say, UCD + EA = New Digital Workplace ?

If you're an enterprise architect tackling some of these issues, I'd love to hear from you.

It happens on an ad-hoc basis now. Collaboration adherents and community facilitators (or just enlightened employees) at Alcatel-Lucent will tell email correspondents to "move" certain conversations to a community space that offers threaded discussions. Or just they just start a new thread themselves. It's a manual process, but when it happens, it seems to work well.

This approach makes all sorts of sense. Moving email to collaboration spaces can:

• Reduce email volume (hooray!) -- maybe not number of messages, but volume of body content to parse
• Make information more searchable and open
• Make conversations more understandable, especially for someone jumping in the middle

Like some other tech firms, Alcatel-Lucent is comparatively sophisticated in this regard. They have a mature implementation and Colombe and his colleagues have worked hard to educate and support their peers.

So what could work for the rest of us?

Here's what I'd like to see collaboration vendors implement: integration at the mail server level that automatically inserts a link to your community platform in certain internal email messages, according to filters you set. That way employees would be encouraged to migrate conversations to your community spaces -- and more importantly, have a really simple means to do so. Ideally the system would already pre-populate the first forum post with the original email subject and content.

For example, you could set rules to insert the move-to-community link into the top of a message body when someone:

• Replies-all to a message
• Receives any message sent to multiple recipients
• Receives any message at all from a colleague

To be sure, I'm leaving out some important technical details. You'd need some signalling downstream to email recipients who didn't know the conversation had moved. And the integration could get tricky -- though not impossible, especially if you just target Exchange for starters.

To my knowledge, none of the social and collaboration tools we evaluate can do this natively today. That's a pity. But perhaps we could all start asking...

Here’s a quick snapshot of what you’ll find in this update:  

• As before, Jive’s software continues to change rapidly from version to version. New modules are being added -- and older ones getting booted out -- fairly regularly as the company strives to maintain its marketplace momentum 
  
  
• Socialtext is championing “social as a layer,” but enterprise integration is never an easy undertaking


• blueKiwi is aggressively courting European enterprises while attempting to add more collaboration services into its networking-oriented platform


• MindTouch no longer focuses on plain-vanilla wikis and internal collaboration, but is going after the online product help and technical documentation use cases


• Mediawiki, open source and powering the biggest wiki of them all (Wikipedia), maintains its “tech-at-heart” profile

One more thing; HD resolution may be new in iPad 3, but our evaluation research has always provided the clearest picture and the richest detail for technology buyers. Version 4.1 continues this time-honored tradition...

I'm not referring here to Yammer's now famous "freemium" approach of getting your colleagues hooked on a free version and then upselling a more enterprisey edition. The real problem is this: employees signing up by virtue of having an enterprise email address believe that the free version of Yammer is an enterprise-sanctioned and perhaps even enterprise-managed solution.

This is of course a complete delusion, albeit a totally understandable one.

As subscribers to our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software research know, Yammer's free version is a legal conundrum for the typical large enterprise. In discussions with senior leaders from among our enterprise subscribers, a recurrent theme has emerged about the constant efforts they must take to educate colleagues about the platform.

Savvier enterprises whose employees have taken to the free version emphasize that their public social media policies apply to Yammer, rather than their internal collaboration policies. That means, for example, that you shouldn't share sensitive data or documents via that channel. Busy employees may not always ingest that message. And at a time when many industry gurus don't recognize the difference between external social media and internal social networking, you can understand why some of your employees may not grasp the nuances either.

At the same time, we don't counsel our subscribers to kill off Yammer eruptions either. Enterprise social networking is hard enough to nurture without suffocating it in the crib. (On the other hand many Yammer experiments end up suffocating on their own for some very specific reasons, but that's another story...)

You need to understand the implications of the free version, and do what you can and should do to mitigate risks until you come up with a sanctioned, supported alternative. That alternative might well include licensing the paid version of Yammer, though in the event, you'll want to review your agreement very closely, since like many cloud providers, Yammer's enterprise edition SLA isn't so hot either.

Other collaboration and social computing providers are watching the Yammer model closely. The more free services the get targeted at enterprise employees, the more you need to educate about acceptable use. Better yet, devise a roadmap to get out in front of those needs. Let us know if we can help.

Yet I remain a bit puzzled as to why the service has gone live at all, since it's clearly far from complete, usable, or reliable. The fact that it took four weeks to build what is essentially a simple web app is all well and good (even though it repeatedly delivered error pages in my test). But the real value that in this sort of application should derive from quality of the information it delivers. Currently the quality of that information is dismal.

From what I can gather 250 firms submitted information on a total of 1500 services they could deliver to the public sector, and all of them have gotten duly listed on the site.

That was the first red flag, and indeed further investigation reveals that as of now not one of those services has been tested or certified in any way at all; the claims have just been taken as verbatim. Even so, Cloudstore allows you to circumvent thorough tendering processes through the Official Journal of the European Community (OJEC), yet cannnot guarantee whatsoever the quality or fit of the services it promotes. 

I found:

• Services offered that run on products that do not meet Government standards
• A dominance of the usual major IT suppliers, claiming to offer almost anything (regardless of actual expertise)
• Many well known and experienced government IT suppliers missing
• Currently no details on what future accreditation will actually mean or demand of a supplier or service

This last point in particular concerns me deeply. Surely it seems fair to assume that "accredited" services and suppliers will have had their organization vetted, that they are viable and solvent, that they have experienced and reliable products and support, and that they meet technical standards.  Buyers will also want a solid understanding of these criteria and how they were met. Surely this is the basic due diligence that any buyer has to undertake? Yet I found no indication here of what accredited status will mean, how it will be administered, and how it will be checked and maintained.

I had high hopes for this system. Perhaps it was just a really bad idea to launch it now, long before the real work has been done.  To my mind this store should not have gone live until all the services and suppliers had been thoroughly vetted and assessed. Expert reviews of the remaining suppliers and further research of the market to ensure that a wide array of viable options is actually represented (rather than just those that have volunteered themselves) also seems necessary.

Until that time, this has little more value than a search on Google or Craigslist, and comes with potentially more risk of those, since it intends to help you shortcut necessary selection steps.

I'm all for speeding up and removing unnecessary bureaucracy from the procurement process, which is actually a one focus area of our business; but to repeat, the web application itself is not the important thing here. You can label it "cloud" and get more buzz, but at the end of the day it's the quality and veracity of the information delivered that matters most.  That information is nowhere near ready for consumption right now.

Now, if you're an industry insider or have been following this blog for a long time, that might seem like old news. We were among the first analyst firms to point to Redmond's own calculations of customers spending six-to-nine dollars on professional services for every dollar spent on SharePoint licensing. We've also consistently pointed out the necessity of corollary information and process management in any SharePoint-sized engagement.

Unfortunately, those details often get lost in the push to get SharePoint "stood up." You can understand why. For most enterprises, it takes herculean effort just to obtain...

• Consensus on basing their collaboration services on SharePoint
• Funding to license the platform across growing ranks of knowledge workers (or wherewithal to finally upgrade from MOSS 2007 to the modern version)
• Resources to implement baseline functionality
• Support to combine myriad departmental initiatives into some sort of enterprise whole
• Savvy business analysts to apply the requisite soft skills
• Large-scale education, training, and team-lead support
• And so on...

So you can probably empathize when, at the end of that process the collaboration manager says, "Phew, we made it!"

Except, of course, they have made almost nothing. And here comes the surprise. Colleagues who were expecting finished applications (like ideation communities) respond, "Is that all?" Some of you cleverly budgeted for add-on tools and services. Many of you didn't, and now have to go back, hat in hand, to sponsors. Ouch.

The most important thing to remember is that outside some very basic functionality, SharePoint is a platform. With enough time, money, and painkillers, you can get it to do almost anything. But then you or your integrator fall into the business of software development (and maintenance).

I sympathize with enterprise architects who argue that their burden becomes an almost impossible knot: business units bring intense integration needs, but those same units don't want an integration platform. They want productized solutions. That's a tough knot for sure. But I've seen first hand that it's a knot you can untie with a clear upfront strategy. Not a "SharePoint strategy," but a collaboration and information management strategy. Make sure you craft one, and let us know if we can help.

For better or worse, the lineage of software gamification dates to the video game industry.  Video games are a serious business with global sales of $56 billion -- double the size of the music industry.  Closely related to social networking, gamification refers (roughly) to applying the techniques of video games to make software more engaging, work more interesting, and the world a funner place. Doing so will increase user participation -- so the theory goes -- and turn customers more loyal and make employees less disgruntled.

Some examples of gamification techniques include honor badges, achievement levels / laddering, loyalty points, leader boards, and challenges. These tap the intrinsic and extrinsic human motivations/behaviors to encourage contributions, while rewarding -- or at least recognizing -- participation.

If this reminds you enough of employee-of-the-month schemes, happy hours, airline loyalty programs, and the like to consider gamification old wine in new bottles, you’re right, at least to an extent. Companies have always been trying to influence customers and modify their behavior, and gamification itself heavily borrows from the field of psychology. What’s novel is consciously trying to embed these principles into work-routines, business processes, and software design.

As you’d expect, there are both external and internal use cases for gamification, targeted at your end-customers and your employees respectively.

Currently, most vendor solutions are focused on external use cases that try to increase brand loyalty. Examples include start-ups (almost all the gamification vendors are start-ups, pointing to the recency of the field) like Badgeville, BigDoor, Gigya, and Bunchball .

For internal use cases, (e.g., if you want to gamify your digital workplace), there are not many out-of-the-box solutions available. Bunchball has released apps that integrate with Jive and Salesforce software. Attini has a badges application for Sharepoint. Rypple, which had apps for gamifying internal HR applications, was acquired by Salesforce. None of the larger enterprisey vendors (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, et. al.) nor WCM vendors (Adobe, OpenText, etc.,) nor major social software suite vendors (Telligent, Jive, Socialtext, etc.) natively provide packaged gamification features.

However, if you want to experiment, you could start by adding game-like dynamics such as leader boards to your Intranet, with a bit of custom development.  Just make sure you haven't skipped some essential social networking and project support services first.  Your colleague Claire doesn't need game dynamics to help her find out what her predecessors have done on the Penske account she just inherited. She wants her intranet to either connect her with the right information so she can track down the right people, or connect her with right people so they can point her to the right information. Ideally both. 

Indeed, while cheerleaders (vendors and consultants) drum up the hype, gamification is not without its pitfalls. Without a clear “what’s-in-it-for-me” proposition, people will eventually see through institutional ploys. Also, gamification adherents frequently underestimate the difference between workplace and consumer environments.  In the workplace, for example, recognition typically trumps rewards, and the quality of participation will almost always trump quantity (something many vendors haven't grasped).

Your chances of success will be higher if you follow a well-reasoned approach that respects your users, be they customers or employees. Gamification can easily deliver instant gratification, but creating lasting satisfaction is no child’s play.

Having said that, Jive’s earnings release is interesting for a couple of reasons:

1. They’re the first pure-play social technology vendor to go public
2. Jive management discussed their results and strategy for the first time since their IPO in December. 

Here, I won’t dwell on how they fared financially but will only focus on implications for you as a potential buyer of collaboration / social software.

Buoyed by the cash infusion from the IPO, Jive is significantly ramping up its sales and marketing resources, and their game plan is to land more big-ticket deals from the big fish (i.e., large enterprises). At least at this stage, Jive does not seem to think “small is beautiful,” so if you’re a mid-sized business or otherwise have a more modest social initiative, you should note this in drawing up your vendor shortlists. Ideally, you’d want a vendor for whom you are important or otherwise a good fit size-wise. Not to worry there: the collaboration / social software marketplace features many interesting vendors who gladly welcome the small or mid-sized customer.

Jive also announced partnerships with more large systems integrators. Among others, Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, HP, Logica, Infosys, Sapient, et. al. now can help implement Jive software for you. These represent formidable and sizable integrators, and if you’re a large enterprise, that’s likely a positive, since most probably your procurement team prefers established SIs. But as a general rule, the overheads of large systems integrators make sense only if the deal size rises above a particular threshold (usually millions rather than thousands). This further supports my contention that Jive is opting out of the sub-enterprise market. 

On a different note, Jive says that more enterprises are procuring social software using the RFP route. That's a very good thing.  But if you’re pursuing that route, don’t just rely on checklist feature matrices, but make sure that you ask vendors to demonstrate how their technology works for your scenarios as part of the evaluation process. We’d be happy to help whether you’re a small business or a large one.

So I came up with three major lessons that seemed worth sharing:

1. Your internal competencies may be the biggest factor in your success implementing technology
2. Every prediction of significant marketplace "consolidation" has been wrong, although M&A activity has proven painful for customers
3. What makes your enterprise unique (and therefore successful) also plays out in how you apply technology

As always, welcome your thoughts in the comments below...

Biggest changes have come around acquisitions (e.g., HP), and a fast-moving Red Line (a.k.a., Collaboration & Social), as well as a number of key entrants in the Digital & Media Asset Management segment.

For higher-resolution JPG and nicely-printable PDF versions of the map, visit
http://www.realstorygroup.com/vendormap/

Hope you find it helpful!

It's a question that many of our advisory customers have been asking us, so we decided to answer it in briefing format.

Cloud-based file-sharing services have obtained some traction, even among larger organizations, because of ease of provisioning and mobile access, as well as for exchanging files with external parties. At least five major providers now target enterprise customers for hosted file sharing: Box, Dropbox, Huddle, Oxygen, and ShareFile.

Just today in fact when talking with a major industrial manufacturer, the excitement and possibilities of working with such suppliers was tempered with concerns over their readiness and maturity to deal with real enterprise needs. To quote this prospective customer, "All these vendors tell us they work with big enterprises, but when we speak to them it feels like it's the first time a real enterprise has asked real enterprise questions of them..."

Certainly cloud providers are here to stay, and if employed in the right circumstances can bring real benefits, but it's still early days as our research paper details.

But now Jive has IPO'ed, and customers have reasonable expectations about understanding where the company will go after transitioning beyond it's venture-fueled youth. Financial analysts seem to expect more of same regarding the company's stock price, but if you know us, then you know that we don't focus on that. What matters is vendor "fit" for you the software buyer.

And in that regard I think Jive's biggest challenges going forward will prove institutional. Jive's a "tweener" vendor: no longer small and agile, but lacking the huge resources to execute globally in way that, say, an IBM can. Moreover, Jive's offerings are divided among significantly different use-cases (external communities and internal collaboration), and delivery models (hosted and on-premise). Doubtless this diversifies revenue streams in  ways that appeal to equity markets, but is this strategy best for customers? I have my doubts. It's very hard to reconcile the inevitable codebase forks.

Meantime, customers have hinted to us that they wish Jive would invest more in refactoring the underlying platform itself. Jive's core, Java-based platform is rich and therefore complicated -- and thus prone to some of same problems that the big players experience. Case in point: readers of our evaluation report know that many Jive customers remain stuck on previous versions because extensive customization can make upgrades unusually fraught.

Of course, refactoring a codebase while maintaining backwards compatibility with a large, diverse installed base is an unusually complex undertaking for any vendor. But now that Jive has grown up, customers should reasonably expect them to be able to pull it off. It's where the question gets called of finding sufficient resources while also scratching Wall Street's quarterly itch. We'll keep watching, on your behalf.

Our subscribers will see several new vendors under review as well as an overhauled set of evaluation criteria. More about those in the coming weeks.

For now I'd like to share one of the big themes of the report: customer disappointment with major platform vendors.

Why? It turns out that business units want....ready-made business applications, not the promise of a development platform. And while major platform vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) can check numerous functional boxes for collaboration and social networking, they don't provide many polished applications out-of-the-box.

Some commentators have suggested that the real answer here lies in broader ecosystems, and I believe there's some truth to that. But "ecosystem" for platform vendors today primarily means armies of systems integrators willing to write one-off extensions to the base code, at no small fee. This becomes yet another dimension to the disappointment customers are sharing with us.

I'm not suggesting that an all best-of-breed approach is nirvana. To quote my colleague Kashyap from our media release yesterday:

To be sure, a mixed vendor strategy presents near-term challenges for enterprise systems architectures, as well as long-term challenges for business users, who may later confront splintered profiles and disconnected activity streams.

The good news is that, in this maturing Enterprise 2.0 marketplace, you have a wide array of plausible choices.

Subscribers can find the latest updates here. To download a free sample, click here.