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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