Intranet Blog

SharePoint: Square pegs in round holes

Toby Ward — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:41:18 -0700

Prescient's Jed Cawthorne discusses the time and place for SharePoint (MOSS):

Microsoft's SharePoint technologies have their sweet spots in that they definitely fulfill specific requirements for certain use cases within the bigger picture of varied information management scenarios.

However, MOSS is not a panacea. It is not the solution to every information management related business problem, and despite what others may tell you, it's certainly not a 'one size fits all' technical solution to all those annoying business issues.

Employee social networking (case study)

Toby Ward — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:22:28 -0700

We humans are social creatures. With rare exception, we strive to relate, converse and connect with others. Social networking promotes online communities of interests and activities that promote connections between users in a more open and robust manner than simple e-mail.

While best represented by the quintessential MySpace and Facebook, social networking has made significant strides into the corporate intranet where employee networking is becoming a valuable asset to leading organizations that covet the new breed of employee. This young, web savvy employee cohort desires – if not demands – a more social and dynamic work environment that uses the best possible Web 2.0 (Intranet 2.0) technology.

Though e-mail still occupies an important stronghold in the nascent world of Intranet 2.0, social and employee networking communications is best embodied by instant messaging, discussion forums, and RSS technology. While these technologies build upon the value of the archetypal killer application that is e-mail, the real value delivered by employee networking is the group communications dynamic where a single employee can communicate both actively and passively with other similar or ‘connected’ employees or the entire employee population as a whole.

Sabre Town: Sabre's employee networking intranet site

Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among other systems, is an impressive leader in employee networking. With nearly 10,000 employees spread around the globe (55% work outside of the U.S. where they are headquartered), Sabre is a progressive company that has Intranet 2.0 with spectacular results.

Recognizing their own unique needs as a global, distributed workforce, Sabre embarked to build their own employee networking intranet from scratch. Using another nascent technology, Ruby on Rails, Sabre built an impressive employee networking platform called Sabre Town. Sabre Town represents the company’s need to build more meaningful connections with this geographically diverse employee population.

Want to learn more about what others are doing? Take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and get the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.

Read the complete Sabre employee networking case study article

Social software that power Intranet 2.0

Toby Ward — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:53:45 -0700

“Looking for greater flexibility and support for more ad hoc processes, employees have responded with a more bottom-up approach, in some cases circumventing official information systems,” say CMS Watch Founder Tony Byrne and contributing analyst Jarod Gingras, the principal authors of The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008.

CMS Watch's social media vendors matrix.

In other words, if your organization hasn’t embraced and standardized social software, your employees will begin installing it and using it without your permission. I know of what client that only found out recently that 15% of their employee base had voluntarily joined a dedicated company Facebook site. At BT, 4,000 employees formed their own “BT Facebook” site. BT took note and in response built their own social networking site called MyBT (see The power of Intranet 2.0).

If your organization hasn’t already developed an Intranet 2.0 plan (social media plan), you would do well to develop one before employees develop their own. This plan ideally contains the business case for moving to Intranet 2.0. Byrne and Gingras cite a number of business benefits to implementing enterprise social software:

Hard benefits:

Reduce expenses
Increase productivity
Increase customer retention

Soft benefits:

Improve internal communication
Improve internal collaboration
Improve employee morale and retention

I cited a number of positive ROI examples, or link to others, in Intranet 2.0: A must-have.

While a plan is a must, an even more difficult task may be the selection of the actual software that will power your Intranet 2.0 – there are now hundreds of solutions on the market. The Enterprise Social Software Report dissects the capabilities of 20 different social software (social media) solutions for Intranet 2.0 (or Web 2.0) including those from:

IBM (Lotus Connections)
SharePoint
Connectbeam
Facebook
Google (Blogger)
MediaWiki
Socialtext
and others

Each of these solutions are reviewed for their business service uses including:

Blog
Wiki
Social Ranking
Project Tracking & Participation
Multimedia
Info Filtering
File Sharing
Web Conferencing
Discussion Forums
Presence / Instant Messaging (IM)
People Finding (e.g. social networking)

All of this is rated according to various Administration & System Services (e.g. security, analytics, etc.) and various corporate scenarios (e.g. Enterprise Collaboration, Project Collaboration, etc.).

Some interesting notes regarding the two big solutions, SharePoint and Lotus Connections / Quickr:

Lotus Connections / Quickr: strong social networking, strong presence and IM tools, excellent integration with Notes and emerging Outlook connectors, and an innovative Blackberry application; “underwhelming blog/wiki” and requires WebSphere Portal for roles and group modules – best for Enterprise Networking; poor for Project Collaboration.
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007): broad range of third-party plug-ins, lightweight portal services including bundled applications and lightweight document and records management services into social applications, search works well in an all-SharePoint environment; almost all native services are weak compared to competitors, near complete absence of social networking, social tagging & Bookmarking, and surprisingly weak integration with Outlook – best for Project Collaboration (e.g. team sites); poor for Enterprise deployments.

In short, Lotus is a better enterprise solution; SharePoint is a better project or team solution.

Regardless, 20 different products are reviewed in detail (from 10 – 25 pages per product review) and it’s a worthwhile read if you are looking at implementing social media or Intranet 2.0 software. Buy CMS Watch’s Enterprise Social Media Report 2008 (they offer a 30-day, 100% money-back guarantee).

If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Intranet 2.0: A must-have

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0

Embracing Enterprise 2.0

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IBM Fringe: Employee social networking with a purpose

Toby Ward — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:45:03 -0700

Most intranet or employee directories are the most used, if not most popular, applications on the corporate intranet. Most pull key contact information directly from the HR database or ERP; others allow employees to update and maintain their own information.

For those organizations like IBM that allow employees to edit parts of their profile (but not key reporting information like title, department, reporting lines, etc.), an over-looked and under-appreciated challenge often occurs: ensuring that employees actually keep their information up-to-date.

An internal study by IBM some years ago found out that 40% of employee directory listings (called Blue Pages) had not been updated at all in the previous 9 month period. A lot of tacit knowledge and information is left unreported in employee profiles. That in itself is not a big problem if you know who you’re looking for, but in a company of 385,000 employees, finding the right employee for the right issue can be a challenge.

An employee profile page using Fringe, IBM's people tagging system

IBM’s Eric Wilcox and his colleagues came up with a solution: create a parallel system that draws in the key employee information from their directory profile (name, contact information, etc.) and add to it functionality that allows employees – any employee – to assign a keyword or ‘tag’ that helps define the expertise of an individual.

Wilcox et al (Werner Geyer, Stephen Farrell, Tessa Lau and Stefan Nusser) created a people tagging system called Fringe. “People tagging is a form of social bookmarking that enables people to organize their contacts into groups, annotate them with terms supporting future recall, and search for people by topic area,” says Wilcox.

“People-tagging has a valuable side benefit: it enables the community to collectively maintain each others interest and expertise profiles.”

Fringe profiles display contact information and automatically generated information from the Blue Pages directory including:

Communities that they belong to
Blog entries
Bookmarked pages (from their social bookmarking tool, Dogear)

The real value though is in the people tagging:

Employees can tag anyone with any keyword or tag (e.g. a doctor might have the tags “doctor,” “MD,” “surgeon,” “pediatrics,” etc.)
All tags are recorded to the tagger and the tagee (therefore no anonymous tags, and no private or hidden tags)
When you tag someone, they can tag you back (forcing extra diligence and consideration)
Authors of a tag are displayed when hovering over a tag
An outgoing tag cloud shows which tags a person has applied to another
An incoming tag cloud shows what tags has been applied to that person
All tags are linked to the creator, and their respective tags
Users can even tag someone through the corporate instant messaging tool (SameTime)

Employees find added value in being able to search for people or experts by tag (subject matter) that might help them in their day-to-day work.

“People tag other people as a form of contact management, and they confirm in subsequent interviews, that the tags they have been given are accurate descriptions of their interest and expertise,” says Wilcox. “Moreover, none of the people reported offensive or inappropriate tags.”

A link on a Fringe profile page, called Zeigeist, takes the user to a page that consists of a tag cloud containing the most recent 100 people tags across all IBM. It also contains a list of recently active taggers as well as recently targeted taggees (those that have been tagged).

“The goal for this page was to try and characterize or draw out trends in the people tagging space,” adds Wilcox. “For example, let's say a researcher gives a great talk on how IBM is turning scrapped silicon wafers into solar panels. There might a surge in the use of the tags "solar" and "wafer-reuse" which should bubble up in the zeitgeist cloud. The researcher who gave the talk might also drift to the top of the taggee list.”

Man, these IBMers are smart.

While IBM’s Beehive social networking site (see Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM) has proven more ‘viral’ in a shorter period of time, Fringe has enjoyed a modicum of success of its own:

Number of connections: 206,000
Number of profiles tagged: 55,000
Average tags per profile: 3.21
Number of people tagging: 8,500
Average tags per tagger: 20.73
Total number of tags: 178,000
Self-tags: 31,569

“I think the biggest take home here is that the greater IBM population is able to benefit from a relatively smaller population of taggers,” says Wilcox. “This plays very well into the power law distribution of many social systems. By making tags social in Fringe, not only does the tagger benefit but the community and taggee all benefit as well.”

More directly, says Wilcox, tag benefits 3 users:

The tagger (helps him/her describe a person),
The taggee (profile gets populated by others), and
The general public (tags are aggregated to add context and improve expertise search).

So some might ask the question, how does Fringe relate to Beehive, their employee social networking site?

”Fringe started from a very different place,” says Wilcox. “Fringe's main goal is to create a better - more representative - corporate directory.”

Wilcox highlights some of the differences between Beehive’s social networking, and Fringe’s people tagging:

Everyone at IBM has a Fringe page by default where as in Beehive users must opt in and join Beehive explicitly.
Content in Beehive such as photos, Hive-5's, and events must all be entered manually. Fringe grabs existing corporate data automatically for the user (except the people tags).
Connecting in Fringe requires confirmation while connecting in Beehive does not.
Beehive is meant to be more of a place to go and socialize; Fringe is primarily still a corporate directory and expertise search system.

“It has been asked more than once why wouldn't Beehive and Fringe eventually merge...? I find this to be a very interesting prospect and may be the ultimately desirable state,” adds Wilcox. “However, both teams are still investigating really interesting problems from different perspectives.”

But Wilcox et al are not resting on their laurels: the next iteration of Fringe is already underway. “We are continuing to aggregate from even more exotic sources than before!”

There are of course many different ways to ‘socially network’ as represented by both Fringe and Beehive, My Space and Facebook. Regardless of the approach, each serves distinct needs and purposes. Your organization might benefit from one approach, all of the approaches, or perhaps none. Regardless of the view, one conclusion cuts through all the social chatter and business networking: employee social networking fulfills a great need and desire of many employees who are already networking on the public Internet (see The power of Intranet 2.0).

Next week I’ll examine two other employee social networking sites: BT (MyBT) and Sabre (SabreTown).

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Some of you have gathered by now that I haven’t been writing a whole heck of a lot lately – and it’s not just the good weather that’s kept me from the proverbial typewriter! Actually, things are quite busy and clients and staff of a growing company do require significant attention! I won’t suggest that the demands on my time will slacken in the next few months, but you can count on me to do at least 2 articles / postings per week (sometimes 3-4).

On another note I’d like to welcome to the Prescient Digital Media team: Susana Hsu, and Jed Cawthorne, and a welcome back to Meredith Mcknight who has rejoined our team as a consultant after a year of maternity leave – congratulations! Welcome!

Additionally, I’d like to welcome the following new clients to Prescient: Arconas, BC Transmission Corporation, Nintendo, CCS, CDHA, CSI, IronMountain, Toshiba, and Texas Instruments. I’d also like to welcome back Atomic Energy, Computer Associates (CA), Heart & Stroke Foundation, and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. Many thanks for your business!

Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM

Toby Ward — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:42:27 -0700

“Inspired by Top 10 travel guides, and Amazon’s ListMania, we thought that shared lists could be an interesting content type for an enterprise social networking site,” say Geyer, Dugan, DiMicco, Millen, Brownholtz, and Muller, IBM’s collective brain trust behind IBM’s Beehive social networking site for employees[1].

While Beehive is a social networking site that allows employees to connect, track each others’ activities, share photos, and even schedule events, a key viral ingredient of Beehive’s buzz is the ability to create shared lists – “top 5” lists called “Hive5s”.

“We hypothesized that lists in an enterprise would be used to discuss opinions and share information related to the work context, (e.g. “My favorite RSS readers,” “Best lunch places,” or “Useful web design principles.” Since lists allow users to express preferences and opinions, and put items into an order, we envisioned that they would spark controversy between users and provoke social interaction.”

To create a list a “bee” (user) enters five items related to a given topic (e.g. top 5 products) and can insert a photo or a link to any of the five items, can “tag” each list with keywords, and determine whether or not the list is viewable to any employee, or just to direct connections (friends). Additionally, bees can reuse others lists to create their own list for comparison.

“We decided to explicitly support “reuse” of lists in Beehive, i.e. based on another list, a user can create their own list on the same topic linked back to the original list,” say the Beehive creators[1]. “When we designed the shared lists, we thought that users, when reading a list, might feel compelled to create their own list about the same topic, either because they disagree and want to create a list with different items and ordering, or the topic inspired them to share something similar.”

Once a list is published it can be read by others in several places:

A collection page of recently created lists on the Beehive home page
A collection page of all the lists of a selected user within the users own profile
Within search results of a specific topic or “tag” (keywords).

Each list when viewed reveals:

The text for 5 items
Any annotated photos
Any annotated tags
A ‘reuse map” (who reused it, when, etc.)
A list of “the buzz” (user comments)
A note of how many times that list has been viewed by other bees

The adoption rate is the impressive statistic. Up until August 2007, Beehive was still in ‘trial’ mode and only had a couple of hundred invited users. In the nine months since, Beehive has exploded:

Over 35,000 registered IBM employees
Created over 280,000 social network connections to each other
Posted more than 150,000 comments
Shared more than 43,000 photos
Created over 15,000 "Hive5s” fives"
Hosted over 2000 events

If the “Hive5s” are the key viral ingredient, the “reuse” list is the secret honey. One user comment in IBM’s own internal study sums up the fantastically viral nature of list reuse: “I found it interesting and wanted to reveal and show myself within the community (a specific Beehive community of IBMers) […] and in a sense I wanted to get into this community, so I entered it reusing somebody’s Hive5 and in a friendly way, in some social gesture, reuse the Hive5 and get into the community.” For this bee, and many others, the Hive5 list reuse was an invitation to a community that he wanted to be part of, despite his geographic location.

One early list called “4 truths and a lie” sparked a lot of reuse, dozens of comments, and bubbled over into real-world and face-to-face conversations. “Several times I did it with my team. Like people writing to me and I’m writing to them, saying did you see […] that thing on Beehive, sending the link,” said one user.

In fact, people who don’t know each other are connecting through Beehive, and those that are reusing lists often don’t know each other. “The interview data (from the internal study) suggests that people need not feel any particular connection to the person whose list they reuse” say the creators[1]. “While we found that reuse in itself is not always a social act, there are some reuse trees that have sparked many conversations and have formed ad hoc interest groups”

Beehive clearly demonstrates that employees want to network socially, and that if the employer creates the hive, employees will create the buzz.

Read more about the Beehive social networking site: Beehive builds buzz at IBM.

On Wednesday: A look at IBM’s other employee social networking tool: Fringe. If Beehive is akin to Facebook, Fringe is akin to LinkedIn. However, Fringe is more of a people-tagging tool that is significantly different than any of the above, but equally impressive.

Tomorrow’s (Tuesday) Intranet 2.0 webinar: if you’re a client of Prescient (or about to become one), then you have a free invitation to this special clients-only webinar that will showcase the latest and greatest in Intranet 2.0 including IBM’s Beehive and Fringe, BT’s employee social networking, and many other leading examples. If you’re a client or about to become one and don’t have the coordinates for this hour long webinar, then please call me right away to get the details (416.986.2226). The webinar starts at 1pmEDT (10am PDT). If you can’t make the webinar but still want to learn more, perhaps we can reprise the webinar for you and your team at a later date (call me to arrange).

[1] (Geyer, Dugan, DiMicco, Millen, Brownholtz, and Muller, (2007) “Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type. IBM T.J. Watson Research. Cambridge, MA )

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