There are small start-ups, emerging vendors, and the big enterprise portal and CMS vendors – all are developing and flaunting enterprise 2.0 software (social software). And none of these solutions are perfect.

In fact, even the big guns (e.g. BEA and Microsoft) haven’t figured it out yet. “Your WCM, Collaboration, Portal or ECM system may provide many (but not all) social software services, but some of them may suck,” says CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne.

Though not as broad and deep as the more mature CMS market, the emerging Enterprise 2.0 software market is rapidly growing with hundreds of vendors. Understanding those vendors and all of the emerging solutions is extraordinarily difficult, and would probably require a full-time team just to understand the leading vendors and solutions.

Byrne is an expert on evaluating software solutions (and of course has made a name for himself and a business from his CMS expertise demonstrated at www.CMSWatch.com). Tony provided a summary overview of the current marketplace in a presentation to the Enterprise 3 conference in San Diego, and offered some insights on the bigger enterprise infrastructure software vendors (which would include BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and other biggies).

Though Tony’s analysis and scoring of a solution feature is often done on a 4-point scale across many different categories, here’s my dimmed-down interpretation listed as either a general strength or weaknesses of the big gun vendor’s social software solutions (often bundled with their portal and/or CMS solution):

Strengths:

• Most of the tools are good at spam and naughty word filtering (though missing in the BEA products)
• Personalization
• Specialized handheld delivery (particularly important in Europe)
• Vocabulary, tagging and cloud services

Weaknesses:

• Multi-installation management (“Almost always the answer is “no!” … SharePoint is a perfect example)
• Repository versioning, version control, and search
• Composite application development
• Workflow and process management
• Configuration management – version control of the system and platform (as opposed to the content)
• Internationalization & localization
• Standards compliance

Without question, however, the big guns generally have very shallow solutions that do not compare to the feature-rich and robust solutions of the new start-ups and emerging enterprise 2.0 vendors. But of course, the risks of purchasing a solution from a start-up is inherent – you trade long-term solution viability (i.e. financial strength of the vendor) for less cost and more leading-edge (i.e. bleeding edge).

Tony also provided an introductory analysis of one emerging solution vendor, cited by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor” last year, ConnectBeam. Connectbeam is a turnkey appliance with “an integrated set of social software applications for information sharing and team collaboration”.  In short, ConnectBeam is a solution that allows employees to create rich profiles and to tag and share (social bookmark) content.

Specifially, ConnectBeam lists amongst its product features:

• Social Bookmarking & Tagging 
• Social Networking
• Project communities
• Expert location
• Collective Intelligence  (search toolbar)

Users can import their browser bookmarks and their Deli.co.us bookmarks and share those with other employees as tagged content or via their own profiles (it comes with plug-ins for IE and Firefox (not all vendors have a FireFox vendor).

In a very cursory review (he did an admirable job in a short, one-hour presentation), Tony summed-up ConnectBeam as being good at information filtering, security and access control; but weak for group discussion, creating content, and people finding – and does not come with any RSS feeds. It also has low visibility and therefore its long-term future is not yet known.

Some of Tony’s other recommendations and cautions:

• Socializing software is good, but its is not the same as social software (i.e. just because it’s a good portal solution doesn’t mean it’s a good social software platform)
• The concept of social software is old, but many of the dominant technologies are immature
• Don’t lose site of proper software evaluation techniques

“There is a notion that the tool itself will engender informal ways of working and that you can be similarly casual when introducing a new tool (i.e. social software such as a wiki)…” adds Byrne. “But you shouldn’t leave behind every thing you know about performance, security, and the long-term viability of the vendor.”

In short, due diligence is necessary when evaluating any technology solution.

You can view Tony’s research and summaries of some of his and his analyst’s now famous reports at www.CMSWatch.com.

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SharePoint continues to be at the center of much of the intranet buzz – regardless of the water cooler, conference or country.

Shawn Shell, CEO of Consejo, and author of CMS Watch’s The SharePoint Report 2008 from CMS Watch, accurately summarizes SharePoint in one telling quote during his SharePoint presentation at Enterprise 3: “SharePoint does a lot of things, but it does very few things very well.”

I have maintained for sometime that SharePoint is an excellent intranet platform for departments, or small to medium-size enterprises. We in fact use it for our intranet at Prescient Digital Media (disclosure: we are fully technology-neutral with no partnerships nor reselling agreements with any technology vendor including Microsoft). But I don’t think that Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) is an appropriate enterprise intranet for medium to large organizations that need more robust content management, document management, and application integration. Nonetheless, SharePoint does have its strengths, and weaknesses, regardless of the client organization.

In no particular order, here are some of Shawn’s insights on SharePoint (and his company Consejo works almost exclusively on SharePoint implementations):

PROS:

• Biggest strength: collaboration features and forcing compliance with information management policies. 

OTHER STRENGTHS:

• Blogs are built into every My Site
• Wikis are out of the box
• Reports – the ability to display and work with data from an Xcel worksheet.
• Simple to use out-of-the-box
• Search is very fast
• Contributing content is simple
• Direct integration with Office (XP to 2007)
• Most functionality “exposed” through web services (e.g. all content can be subscribed to via RSS)
• Mobile views via a PDA or phone is out-of-the-box
• Alerts and workflow (though limited to email notification)
• WSRP and SAP integration is included

I would add that if you’re an enterprise Microsoft customer, you can get MOSS for very cheap if not free (but the licensing typically represents 10-30% of the total cost). As well, simple out-of-the-box SharePoint management needs little to no training.

CONS:

• Biggest weakness: Records management and digital asset management (non existent).

OTHER WEAKNESSES:

• The wiki piece is a little weak (“The rumor is that the wiki and blog components were very late additions… they work very well, but the functionality is considerably lower than what you would expect from an enterprise deployment.”)
• Sharepoint does not support AJAX (though there are work-arounds, MS will not support AJAX)
• Customization can be expensive and complex (and limited)
• Content management (“It’s very average content management… its not very fabulous.”)
• Analytics are very, very simple
• Non-Active Directory authentication capabilities
• Social networking built into MySites
• Search returns documents and people
• WSRP and SAP integration is not terribly strong, but it works. 

I would add the following weaknesses: immature technology, weak templates, and a reputation for weak service and training.

Shawn’s recommendations when considering or implementing SharePoint:

• Understand information quantities and needs
• Don’t just throw collaboration tools out there (he cited one client with “out-of-control” team sites and SharePoint sprawl)
• Establish & enforce standards for use
• Establish and closely monitor metrics for content creation
• Continually evaluate and adjust approach to match reality
• Enforce workspace use metrics
• Notify of non-use after 60 days
• Four notifications
• Delete after fourth notification
• Use workflow to suspend assets
• Re-map and migrate intranet sites into Sharepoint
• Use Search to Capture Outlying Sites
• Create a controlled vocabulary (taxonomy and meta data)
• Measure and measure again
• Track search requests against workgroup assets

By the way… the next version of Sharepoint will be released in 2010 along with Office version 14 (MS is superstitiously skipping version 13).

ADDITONAL READING:

Sharepoint to be the new Windows?

Why you should or shouldn’t choose Microsoft Sharepoint

Download the new Sharepoint; Vendor perception versus reality

JUST FOR FUN:

Here's a young kid who is a master impersonator (killer, really) who uses his celebrity voices when reading from the SharePoint marketing material:

http://www.spike.com/video/2869058?cmpnid=716&pt=sr&refsite=7103

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(SEATTLE, WA) “The main functionality we were looking for is solved by Facebook, and so far the satisfaction rate has been stellar so don't want to fix what's not broken,” says Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications, Serena Software.

The successful software company known for helping build other companies intranets using its Collage content management system or mash-up software no longer has an intranet of its own – they use Facebook. Well, Facebook isn’t in fact used for everything; Sharepoint houses private documents (login is required) and HiveLive is being used for sharing documents and additional collaboration.

“Fact is less than 2% of the material on our existing (previous) intranet was deemed confidential,” adds Arteaga. “Today, we use Facebook primarily for pictures, status updates, and team building exercises. There are a number of customers we speak to on the FB platform, as well as vendors. However, no specific business applications reside on FB as of yet.”

Serena is a growing software firm with a highly distributed workforce: 850 employees in 18 different countries, and 35% of its staff work from home – a true 21^st century company.

Now it’s worth noting that Facebook doesn’t offer what is termed a traditional intranet and it has very definitive limits. For example, it doesn’t offer employee self-service tools, a searchable news section or a corporate store.

So while the intranet is more of a collaboration platform that is supported by a document base in Sharepoint, the move to Facebook has been a success with a more than 90% penetration rate within global employee.

“Do I think that Facebook has a future in the Enterprise?” asks Arteaga. “Most definitely, but only if they want it.”

“So far we have received no indication from Facebook that they are looking at solving Enterprise concerns. Till then, we will continue to use it as we have, but we will not be investing heavily to port business applications onto this platform and will look to HiveLive instead.”

As I reported last week, developers have created about 1000 business applications for Facebook… but most of them are fun or social in nature. One application, Feedheads, allows the users to “share the feed items you like with your different friends and networks while also displaying your shared items on your profile.” It also works with Google Reader and NewsGator. So, in other words, think of the collaborative calendar offered by Lotus Notes (or Outlook) where the user can see the schedules of others. Feedheads allows you to see a lot more than their schedule depending on what that user or colleague wants to share (e.g. interesting articles, reports on the competition, meeting reminders, etc.).

“The problem for any business considering Facebook is that it’s a determinedly consumer play, to the extent that I don’t think it can ever seriously fly in the enterprise,” says analyst and ZDnet writer Phil Wainewright. “Facebook trades free functionality in return for attention and relationship data — and users give up a lot of their control over that data. Businesses aren’t willing to make that trade-off.

Serena is definitely a trailblazer and they, and other companies like them will influence Facebook to evolve it to include more business applications and features that may enable it to become a legitimate enterprise or intranet platform. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft would like to acquire it, but another reason why Facebook’s owners may in fact hold onto it, and expand its horizons with true enterprise intranet services.

CONTINUE THE DISCUSSION: Come join the discussion on Facebook on the Intranet Global Forum.

Or join us for the conference session on Facebook atEnterprise3 conference in San Diego. The session will feature a panel discussion with Serena Software's VP of Communications, Kyle Arteaga; Senior Director of Optaros, John Eckman; myself, and moderated by Jarrod Gingras, Analyst with CMSWatch.com.

After failing in their US$47.5-billion bid for Yahoo, the giant Microsoft is looking more closely at Facebook. While the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft bankers have begun to look into a Facebook purchase, neither side has commented on the story (a sure sign that something is afoot).

Facebook in itself is a giant… one that could make Yahoo blush one day. With more than 70 million active users its value was pegged at US$15-billion last October when Microsoft bought a minority stake for a mere US$240-million.

What makes Facebook an even greater value than its investment price a mere 8 months ago is its growing popularity – and growing platform. There are only 7 websites on the planet that receive more monthly traffic than Facebook – and Facebook only opened to the public 18 months ago after starting as a college only niche. Of the sites that get more traffic ...

Microsoft’s flagship portal sits in fifth (according to the industry benchmark, Alexa.com). Its viral power is far stronger than MySpace (notwithstanding the music scene), and its growing at a faster clip. I don’t know of anyone that uses MySpace, and yet virtually everyone I know under the age of 45 has a Facebook account. According to ZincResearch.com, 90% of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 are Facebook members (9 million).

Of perhaps greater interest is the ever-expanding “Facebook Platform” and its potential as a platform service inside the corporation (for example, intranet platform). Facebook Platform is the place where all of those creative nerds build and add those cute little applications that are optional add ons to your Facebook profile. Popular applications include “Fun Wall” (2.5 million active users), “Scrabulous” and that dam vampire biting ‘game’.

Read my complete article Microsoft wants Facebook.

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