Chapter 9
Charting the Products and Vendors
In This Chapter
Overcoming information overload
Getting started for free
Identifying distinguishing characteristics of the leaders
Dealing with SharePoint
Now it’s time to consider some leading social collaboration products and platforms.
The nature of book publishing means that this overview captures only a snapshot of a rapidly changing market. I do my best to provide updates on the For Dummies website. Of course, I also encourage you to keep tabs of the coverage on InformationWeek Social Business as well as other news and analyst reports.
This is the chapter where I help you sort out the crowded social collaboration vendor market and narrow your choices to a short list. I also tell you how you can try some programs for free, start a pilot program, and evaluate some of the major players. Because so many companies use SharePoint, I tell you how you can incorporate it (or not) into your social collaboration plan.
Examining Selected Social Collaboration Vendors
This section includes all the products listed in Gartner, Inc.’s 2012 Magic Quadrant review of “Social Software in the Workplace” plus a few additions Gartner didn’t consider or excluded for not meeting its criteria.
Because it is consistently ranked as a leader in this space by Gartner, Jive sponsors free access to the full report through its website, www.jivesoftware.com.
Gartner categorizes vendors with this terminology:
Leaders: Rank high on both “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute”
Challengers: Have the ability but are judged less complete
Visionaries: Have the vision but lack some other strengths
Niche players: Aren’t as complete or as strong
To keep these rankings in context, consider that a so-called niche player that addresses a need important to your organization could be a more appropriate choice than an enterprise product from IBM or Jive that would be overkill for your needs. On the other hand, those vendors would argue that the cloud versions of their products provide room to grow for a small but fast-growing company.
I used Gartner’s categorization to pick the leaders listed below, but the same firms also rank high in the analysis of other market research firms.
Reviewing the leaders
Vendors will come and go, and some will merge, and product names will change, but I feel confident saying that Jive, IBM, Microsoft (with SharePoint and Yammer), and Salesforce.com will still be among the market share leaders in social collaboration.
The question is which of them, if any, is the right choice for your organization.
The first three I will discuss are available as on-premises software as well as cloud or hosted solutions.
IBM Connections: This is one of the most comprehensive social collaboration platforms, including activity stream, discussion group, task management, wiki, and file management modules. Connections can support both public and private social communities. Connections is a comprehensive product that also integrates with other IBM portal, collaboration, and content management products.
Consider this solution if the credibility, support, and consulting services offered by IBM help make the sale to management. Connections also makes sense if you want a comprehensive collaboration platform, rather than one focused on the activity stream alone.
Jive: Jive Software’s social collaboration solution is rivaled only by IBM as a comprehensive social collaboration platform used by large enterprises, including tools for discussion, blogging, file sharing, and wiki-like web content management. Like Connections, it can be configured to support either public or private social websites. Jive gained additional credibility and financing with a December 2011 IPO.
Jive may be the right solution for your organization if you want a comprehensive social platform used by major enterprises. The cloud edition makes Jive more accessible for smaller businesses and teams within larger firms.
SharePoint: Because Microsoft provides this product, it’s ubiquitous in large companies, and SharePoint 2013 made it into a more complete social collaboration platform. Microsoft’s 2012 purchase of Yammer opens new possibilities, particularly for users of the Office 365 cloud edition of SharePoint. SharePoint is often paired with social software add-ons like NewsGator.
This may be a good choice for your organization if SharePoint already is being used effectively for internal collaboration, particularly if your organization is also a “Microsoft shop” for other collaboration tools, such as Lync unified communication.
These leading social collaboration platforms are available in the cloud only:
Salesforce.com products: Salesforce.com offers multiple social products, including Chatter, Work.com, and Do.com.
• Chatter: Chatter can be used independently as a stream-centric social collaboration platform, but it’s best known and most used as a companion to the Salesforce.com cloud software for sales, marketing, and customer support. Major enterprises often employ Chatter with their sales teams even if they use other social collaboration products for other functions. A basic version of Chatter is included for free with Salesforce.com CRM.
Two other significant products are
• Work.com: Used for social employee recognition and continuous performance reviews. Can be used in combination with Chatter.
• Do.com: Used for social task management.
Consider these options if you use other Salesforce.com products, particularly if your key social collaboration scenarios revolve around sales, marketing, and customer support.
Yammer: Microsoft’s Yammer came to market as “Facebook for business” yet it is also an increasingly credible enterprise collaboration platform for businesses large and small. In addition to a Facebook-like central newsfeed, Yammer supports collaboration groups, including the capability to include external participants. Yammer doesn’t include blog or wiki modules per se, but its rich microblogging tool and the notes module in Yammer groups can be used for similar purposes. Synergies with Microsoft SharePoint and Office are emerging and should become a stronger selling point over time.
Yammer may work best for your organization if you want a familiar Facebook-like social environment for collaboration. The free version of Yammer includes all its major features, with the exception of enterprise account administration tools. Meanwhile, Microsoft is pricing aggressively for Yammer Enterprise and Yammer in combination with other cloud software like Office 365.
Let me emphasize again that I’m not saying these should be the choices at the top of your list, only that they are big, credible players. Read on for more options.
Collaborating in the cloud
Like Yammer and Chatter, many social collaboration products are offered exclusively in the cloud. I discuss the advantages and tradeoffs of cloud-based collaboration software in Chapter 10.
Box: Box primarily focuses on cloud-based file sharing for business but does provide social commenting as well as integration with Jive.
Consider Box if file sharing with mobile workers or external partners is your main concern. I don’t think of Box as a complete social platform, but it is a serious file and document collaboration player with enterprise appeal.
Google Apps and Google+: Google has all the elements for social collaboration, both inside and outside an organization, but the barrier between the two is more permeable than with other solutions. Google+ Circles make it possible to share only with a specific group of people, and Google Apps account holders can limit the sharing of a post to only members of their e-mail domain.
Consider Google if your organization is going all-in with Google services.
Huddle: Huddle is a software as a service (SaaS) product that falls somewhere between Box and Yammer, emphasizing internal and external file collaboration but more complete as a social collaboration platform than Box.
If file collaboration with employees and external partners is important to your strategy, along with social discussion, consider Huddle.
Igloo: Igloo Software markets its product as “a modern intranet,” including activity streams, commenting, and private blogs, as well as file sharing.
Consider Igloo if you want a simple, streamlined cloud collaboration solution.
Moxie Collaboration Spaces: Collaboration Spaces is part of the Spaces by Moxie Suite focused on web customer service (chat, knowledgebase, and self-service), where internal collaboration is positioned as a tool for delivering better and faster answers to customers.
If your most important collaboration scenarios revolve around customer service and support, this may be a good application for you.
Podio: Citrix bought Podio in 2012, adding the innovative cloud startup to the family of products that includes GoToMeeting. Podio combines social software concepts with an emphasis on task management and user-designed apps for structured collaboration.
This solution can be a good choice if you value Podio’s approach to social task management and structured web collaboration to replace inappropriate uses of spreadsheets.
SAP JAM: This cloud-only social collaboration platform is based on a social tool from SuccessFactors (a cloud-based human resources and talent management service that was acquired by SAP) as well as elements of an SAP social workflow product called StreamWork. SAP is integrating social feeds with its business applications in addition to providing a social workspace.
This option is a good choice if you have a commitment to SAP or SuccessFactors that makes JAM the most natural choice.
Cloud, hosted, or on premises
These products are available as traditional enterprise software that you can install on your own servers or host on dedicated equipment. Each also offers some option for a subscription-based cloud deployment option.
blueKiwi: According to Gartner, blueKiwi “was one of the first products to base the user experience on activity streams. In 2012, blueKiwi was acquired by Atos, Europe’s second-largest IT services provider.”
Consider this option if you want a stream-centric social platform with a reputation for being easy to implement.
Confluence: The Confluence wiki first gained a foothold as a platform for software documentation, dovetailing with Atlassian’s bug-tracking software for developers. Since then, Confluence has grown into a broader social software platform for many applications.
Consider this option if wiki-style content management is an important aspect of your social software strategy. Confluence is also a relatively affordable product, accessible to small-to-midsize businesses.
Drupal: This free open source software has strong community backing and more than 10,000 add-on modules available. Acquia provides corporate support and commercial extensions. Social intranet is one of many possible Drupal web portal configurations.
Drupal will suit your organization if flexibility, customization, and cost advantages outweigh the complexities of working with open source software (which can be mitigated with Acquia hosting and consulting services).
Liferay: Liferay is an open source, Java-based web portal platform with a Social Office module for social collaboration.
Liferay’s social solution can fit into a broader open source strategy for your web content and applications.
NewsGator: A favorite social add-on to SharePoint in the years when Microsoft support for social features was clearly incomplete, NewsGator retains a loyal base of customers who trust it to continue to innovate ahead of Microsoft. NewsGator is also developing social applications such as video publishing, ideation, and talent management that go beyond the base features of a social platform.
If you’re committed to the SharePoint platform but not satisfied with its stand-alone features and unwilling to adopt Microsoft’s cloud-only option (Yammer), consider NewsGator.
OpenText Social Communities: OpenText is a solid enterprise software player best known for content management, process management, and search technologies.
Consider this option if you value integration with other OpenText products.
Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter: Oracle aims to offer social features integrated throughout its enterprise applications suite, which can be a good long-term strategy for making social collaboration more pervasive. However, Oracle has yet to establish itself as a major social software player.
If your organization uses multiple products from the Oracle applications suite or values Oracle’s credibility as an enterprise option, you may also consider adopting an Oracle social collaboration platform.
Saba PeopleCloud and Saba Social Collaboration: Saba’s interest in collaboration software grew out of its products for corporate training and talent management, including videoconferencing and discussion boards for peer-to-peer learning. Saba has progressively broadened the social collaboration features of its traditional on-premises software, while also introducing a separate cloud-based Saba PeopleCloud product aimed primarily at new customers and smaller businesses.
This may be a good option for you if your approach to social collaboration starts with training, workforce development, and other human resources concerns, or if you already have a commitment to other elements of the Saba platform.
Socialcast: Socialcast is a stream-centric social collaboration platform that started in the cloud, but caught VMware’s attention partly by offering customers the option of on-premises deployment as a software appliance, hosted using virtualization technology. VMware acquired the company in 2011, making it the flagship of a social and productivity software division.
This may be a good option for your organization if you’re seeking an enterprise solution focused on the social stream and discussion groups and don’t require wiki or content management tools in the same platform.
Socialtext: One of the earliest commercial social software products, Socialtext started in 2002 as an enterprise wiki and broadened to include more social software features. In 2012, it sold to Bedford, which also owns Peoplefluent, and began increasing its emphasis on HR and training scenarios for social collaboration.
This can be a good choice if you want a relatively simple product, suitable for a small to midsize organization, or you like the focus on HR and training scenarios. Like Socialcast, Socialtext takes a virtualization technology approach to providing an on-premises option for customers who prefer that.
Teambox: Teambox, a social collaboration environment with a task management focus, is typically used by small firms or teams within larger ones.
If you want a streamlined social team workspace, Teambox can be a good fit.
Telligent Enterprise: Along with IBM and Jive, Telligent is in the small club of social software players that offers a broad social platform that can be delivered in different configurations for either internal collaboration or public customer and partner communities.
If you want a broad social software platform, particularly if you value using the same platform both internally and externally, consider Telligent Enterprise.
Tibbr: Tibco’s stream-centric social collaboration tool is used by major global enterprises like KPMG but also accessible to smaller firms through the cloud. Tibco’s heritage in integration middleware gives tibbr enterprise credibility.
If you want collaboration in the social stream, linking to rather than duplicating other content management and collaboration tools, tibbr may be the solution for your organization.
WebEx Social: WebEx Social (formerly known as Cisco Quad) emphasizes integration with Cisco products for instant messaging as well as Internet voice and video, making it easy to initiate a phone or video call through the social stream or an employee profile.
Choose this option if integration with other Cisco products is important to your organization. WebEx Social is available as a Cisco cloud service, through third-party hosting services, or as on-premises software.
But wait — there’s more!
Despite a couple of dozen choices, the information already presented in this chapter is far from comprehensive. You can find dozens of others with different ideas of what social software should be, with new players emerging all the time. Here are other choices I would advise considering, depending on your criteria:
Social task management: Consider Asana, Appian, Samepage, Sparqlight, Wrike, and Mindjet. Each takes a different approach.
• Asana gets a little extra attention because it was founded by two Facebook technologists (including Dustin Moskovitz, a former CTO and onetime Harvard dorm roommate of Mark Zuckerberg), insists its app revolves around a “work graph” not a social graph.
• Appian is a business process management tool sprouting social extensions.
• Samepage also positions itself as a file sharing tool.
• Sparqlight and Wrike are social task managers that can be used alone or integrated with other social platforms.
• Mindjet applies mind-mapping techniques to the visual display of project and planning data.
Open source options: I talk about Liferay and Drupal earlier in this chapter. Here are a few more:
• eXo: The eXo platform is competing for attention as an open source portal with social features.
• Apache Shindig project: This is the reference implementation of the OpenSocial standards. I’ve mostly heard about Shindig in the context of testing OpenSocial application scenarios (for example, in Ford’s advanced IT lab) and as a foundation technology for other products, including eXo and Cisco’s WebEx Social.
SharePoint social extensions: Although NewsGator is the best-known social companion to SharePoint, there are others.
• Neudesic Pulse: Neudesic Pulse is another Microsoft partner app, a separate application on the Microsoft platform that integrates with SharePoint.
• Sepulveda: A product of the interactive design firm Blue Rooster, Sepulveda is a tightly integrated application that runs on top of SharePoint as a platform.
Social collaboration also overlaps with other technologies for managing documents, content, and knowledge. For a big-picture view, look at an analytic tool that The Real Story Group publishes for free, its vendor “subway map” available at:
www.realstorygroup.com/vendormap
The vendor map shows the relationships between many different content and collaboration technologies, showing where the overlaps are like junctions between the subway lines representing categories like Collaboration & Social Software and Portals and Content Integration.
Building a Short List of Candidates
In some organizations, one vendor will be the presumptive choice from the beginning. There are enterprises that embrace the label of being an IBM shop or a Microsoft shop (they typically follow that company’s lead on social collaboration). And that loyalty can be the best decision, based on the depth of the relationship as much as the technology. Still, step back long enough to look at the alternatives seriously enough to judge whether the default choice is really the best choice. By this point in the process, you may already be talking with vendors, but you will be just gearing up to talk with a few of them more seriously.
Review your prioritized list of requirements, read the news stories, case studies, white papers, and whatever analyst reports your budget allows.
On the other hand, if you’re still at the stage of experimentation, you may want to jump ahead to piloting a couple of products with small teams and seeing what works. This can make perfect sense given the availability of free trials and freemium products, but you still need a short list of things to try. Even if they don’t cost money, pilots can be expensive in time invested.
For a methodical approach, you want your list to be narrow enough that you will not be wasting time on unrealistic options but broad enough that you don’t prematurely eliminate good choices. Ask for a demo that not only showcases the product’s major features but shows how they can be applied to your business.
Tony Byrne of The Real Story Group talks about starting with “a longish short list” of plausible vendors and products that you will investigate in more detail. In your first round of research, your goal should be to eliminate most of these, whittling your short list down to those worth talking with more seriously. Before making a decision, he suggests you invite your top two or three picks to participate in a bake-off competition where they will implement a pilot instance of the software that addresses the specific business scenarios you have in mind for social collaboration.
Getting Started for Free
Consumers like getting stuff for free. Consumer social networks, along with other mass market web services, have trained us to expect to get a lot for free. Periodically, some spoil sport reminds us that we’re paying for most of these things somehow, even if it may not be immediately obvious. That is, when you enjoy ad-supported media, you are the product. Or, to put it another way, consumers “pay” for access to a “free” service like Facebook with their attention and all the data about our behavior that the service gathers, mines, and uses to create products it can sell to advertisers.
Corporate technology buyers tend to be suspicious of free software and services, preferring the comfort of a contract. But often even they see the wisdom of doing some experiments for free before attempting to secure the funding for a more ambitious social collaboration initiative.
Taking advantage of freemium and free trial offers
Yammer and Podio are offered on a freemium model, meaning you can use them indefinitely for free. The premium features, though, aren’t free. For example, Yammer reserves a few features for paying customers (notably, administrative tools that enterprise IT tends to consider indispensible). Podio limits free accounts to five users with full rights although they in turn can invite guest collaborators with limited access.
In both cases, the creators of these applications accept that some fraction of their user base will figure out how to use their tools productively without paying for access; the vendors write off the expense of supporting those users as a form of marketing. More often, organizations that find social collaboration valuable prove willing to transform themselves into paying customers. The ones who stick with free accounts tend to be occasional users, which means the load they put on the service is minimal.
If your organization is a small business or nonprofit with a shoestring budget and no exotic requirements, consider taking the free versions of these products as far as you possibly can.
The right way for an enterprise to take advantage of free or freemium services is deliberately, with a plan for how you will transition from free to paid accounts if that makes sense.
I discuss some of the pitfall of freemium cloud software in Chapter 10.
Calculating the cost of “free”
Freely downloadable open source software, such as Drupal, can be the foundation for social collaboration. The base Drupal technology may be free for the taking, but if you want it neatly packaged for use as a social collaboration platform, or if you want an official source of support when developer community discussion boards aren’t enough, you will pay to get it from Acquia or another firm that offers expertise in Drupal configuration and web development. To quote Richard Stallman, whose Free Software Foundation spurred the open source movement, free software is free as in free speech and not free beer. If you want someone to tailor software to your exact needs, you’re still going to have to pay.
Free cloud services aren’t necessarily free, either. They may cost the CIO in gray hair. They may cost the help desk time and effort dealing with complications introduced by free services, even if they’re not officially supported. A freemium product like Yammer can look to the unsophisticated employee like a corporate service, even if it’s not, because everyone on the collaboration network is an employee of the same firm.
Meanwhile, by sticking with a 30-day free trial model and maintaining the expectation that its software must be paid for in the long run, Jive can afford to assign a “success coach” for every account, providing support to make the trial successful and convert trial customers into paying customers.
These cloud-based free trials are a relatively recent addition to the Jive business model, allowing it to reach a mass market of smaller customers and teams within larger businesses. Meanwhile, Jive continues to sell to larger customers on a more traditional enterprise sales model where the terms of any trial implementation or pilot project are open to negotiation.
Conducting a Pilot Project
Taking advantage of a free cloud service means using it as-is and with minimal support. Often, that’s not good enough, particularly for large organizations with specific business applications in mind.
Planning the pilot project
Using a pilot project bake-off as a decision-making tool before committing to a social collaboration platform means having two or more organizations load your organization’s content into the platform and work with some subset of your employees to put the collaboration platform through its paces.
The bake-off approach probably works best for large enterprises whose business is so desirable that vendors will jump through hoops to win it. Smaller businesses can instead experiment with free trial versions of a few products, applied to some real project or task, before making a bigger commitment.
Considering the cost
If you’re asking vendors to spend weeks demonstrating how they would address your demanding requirements, they may charge a consulting fee to produce the proof-of-concept social network, knowing you can take the ideas regardless of whether you take their software.
You certainly can negotiate hard to get them to do it as inexpensively as possible, if they want to win your business. But paying for a proof-of-concept pilot project, or participation in a bake-off, can make sense if you can make a better decision as a result.
Designing a successful pilot project
Some experts point out that implementing a pilot program can be a mistake, if social collaboration starts off so tentatively that it has little chance of demonstrating its worth. For instance, Andrew McAfee, the business and technology strategist who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” to describe the use of social technologies in business, made this argument in a 2010 blog post that’s still widely quoted. Expressing his frustration over repeatedly hearing from large enterprises that had started with a small pilot project but where unimpressed with the results, he wrote:
I believe these kinds of pilots are unintentionally set up to fail, or at least underwhelm. This is essentially because they contain too few people, most of whom know each other too well.
The more I learn about and think about the value of emergent social software platforms, the more I suspect that the deep meta-benefit they provide is technology-enabled serendipity, defined as ‘good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries.’ Serendipity is possible when we’re collaborating with our close colleagues on a well-defined project, but that’s probably when it occurs least often. It’s much more likely during wide forays and broad searches, the kind that are so easy to do with current technologies.
You can read the rest at:
http://andrewmcafee.org/2010/04/drop-the-pilot/
The preceding is probably a better argument for paying attention to the design of a pilot project — and the assessment of the results — than for scrapping the pilot altogether.
For example, some companies who now boast about the success of their social collaboration initiatives started with a pilot that involved a relatively small number of people but from many locations and divisions. By giving these pilot teams a project to collaborate on for which the social platform was the best solution for a geographically and organizationally dispersed group, the designers of the pilot avoided competing with the type of collaboration that can best be accomplished by shouting across the office.
Generating buzz
Wim de Gier, the senior global project manager at LeasePlan, likes to compare the exclusivity of his firm’s early pilot with IBM Connections to the early days of Gmail, when only a small fraction of Internet users had access to a treasured invitation to try Google’s e-mail service. By restricting access, Gmail created pent-up demand. LeasePlan, a global vehicle leasing and fleet management company, was able to do something similar, enlisting a cross-functional team of 170 people in different business units to try the environment. When their co-workers got curious about the environment and requested access, he would tell them, “Hey, sorry, not allowed.” And in the process, he created buzz for the social software platform. By the time he was ready to take his case to management for implementation of the social tool, he had a list of 1,000 “wannabes” based on all the people who had requested accounts.
Today, Connections is available to 6,000 LeasePlan employees across 40 subsidiaries and 30 countries.
Ensuring access to data
The collaboration strategists in the “kill the pilot project” camp argue that users have little reason to invest their participation, their knowledge, and their valuable content in a platform that the company doesn’t seem to be committed to. Just as having too few people involved frustrates the chances of productive social networking, having too little content in a collaboration system undercuts the value of sharing and searching for information. By the same logic, it makes little sense to invest time in fleshing out your profile and establishing connections with other employees if the entire social network could evaporate at any time.
By this logic, you may limit any pilot phase to IT employees and other technology champions willing to test the environment, with the understanding that it’s not necessarily permanent. Or, you may compensate for the uncertainty by committing to port as much content as possible from the pilot environment to whatever one you eventually land on. At least, you can promise to try to do that, technologies permitting.
Identifying Distinguishing Characteristics of the Leaders
According to Gartner, Inc., the leading social collaboration vendors are Jive, IBM, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft (SharePoint and Yammer).
These organizations are distinguished from the rest by the credibility they have gained from serving the social collaboration needs of some very large organizations, as well as their vision for the future of the technology. These may or may not be the leading contenders on your own short list: Issues of budget, licensing, and the applications you have in mind could drive you in a completely different direction.
Still, Gartner’s selection of leaders have some very different offerings for different strategies.
Choosing a comprehensive platform
If you’re in the market for a comprehensive platform that supports many modes of social networking and social media publishing (including blogs, wikis, file sharing, discussions, profiles, and social streams), you can narrow the list to Jive, IBM Connections, and Microsoft SharePoint.
Vendors like Jive Software fall somewhere between the newly minted startups and the global enterprise systems players. Founded in 2001, with its initial focus on providing public discussion board software for businesses, Jive has developed elements of a platform for enterprise social networking, including an apps market for other software products that can be plugged into the Jive environment. Jive has attracted dozens of major enterprise customers and continues to refine its products to meet their requirements. Jive’s software can be installed on-premise or in dedicated hosting environments that appeal to enterprises that want to maximize control and minimize risk.
At the same time, Jive is trying to expand its appeal with a cloud edition of the platform that is easier for small companies and teams within larger firms to adapt with little or no requirement for support from an internal IT department.
Jive is a youngster compared with IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft, but has been successful enough to hire people with expertise in enterprise systems engineering, boosting the credibility of the organization and the quality of its software. Other broad social platform vendors not included as a Gartner leader would include Telligent Enterprise and NewsGator Social Sites (as a companion to SharePoint).
Focusing on the activity stream
Another strategy is to focus on the activity stream and modes of interaction that are unique to social networking, as opposed to previous modes of groupware collaboration. The products most focused on the activity stream (from the Gartner leader quadrant) are Chatter and Yammer.
Others to consider would be VMware Socialcast and Tibco’s tibbr.
Supporting a specific application like sales collaboration
If your priority is improving collaboration for the sales team, or between sales and marketing, Salesforce.com’s Chatter jumps to the forefront — if, that is, your organization uses Salesforce.com CRM. Part of Microsoft’s strategy with Yammer is to deliver a similarly strong pairing with its Dynamics CRM product.
Other application scenarios may lead you to other products from outside the Gartner leaders quadrant. For example, both Saba and Socialtext emphasize the use of their products in the context of human resources and training. SAP JAM grew out of the enterprise application suite vendor’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, which provides cloud applications for managing and motivating a workforce, and SAP is using JAM to embed social functionality in other enterprise applications as well, including CRM.
Managing tasks and projects
Over the past few years, a surge in interest in social task management has spawned startups such as Asana, Sparqlight, and Wrike, but some of the leading platforms have this functionality built in.
If managing tasks and projects through a social tool is an important selection criteria, IBM Connections stands out for its Activities app, created specifically for coordinating related tasks while using the social network as a medium for making assignments and tracking progress. Microsoft SharePoint also includes a robust task management system that social applications can leverage.
Among lightweight cloud applications, Podio is a social collaboration network with an emphasis on task management and other ways of organizing work.
I discuss social task management in Chapter 6.
Dealing with SharePoint
Speaking of SharePoint, Microsoft’s portal software winds up factoring into practically every social collaboration strategy, regardless of whether it is at the center of that strategy.
At a minimum, every serious social collaboration tool for enterprise use must include some form of SharePoint integration, and the quality of that integration often ranks high among the selection criteria of corporate customers.
About 75 to 80 percent of the Fortune 500 are SharePoint customers. When the product was new, Microsoft made a practice of distributing a free version of the software with Windows Server, which became an easy option for departmental server administrators looking to provide basic intranet publishing. Today, there is still a free version called SharePoint Foundations 2013. When more demanding applications emerged, many organizations that got started for free paid for an upgrade. Microsoft has also successfully promoted SharePoint as a platform for file sharing and application development. The SharePoint 2010 edition added some basic social collaboration features, including status posts and MySite profiles.
In a 2012 InformationWeek article on “10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles,” I included SharePoint as Obstacle #5 because it was so ubiquitous that major enterprises tended to gravitate toward it, even though at the time it wasn’t terribly competitive. I based this charge partly on the lament of Dion Hinchcliffe, executive vice president of strategy at Dachis Group and social business enthusiast. In a blog post from about the same time, he had written, “SharePoint has often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in particular.”
Since then, Microsoft has made itself a more competitive player in social collaboration with the release of SharePoint 2013 and the purchase of Yammer.
Assessing commitment to Microsoft’s collaboration platform
Where SharePoint falls in your social collaboration strategy will depend on your commitment to the platform. Ask yourself these questions:
Is SharePoint a core, strategic technology platform for your organization, filled to the brim with assets that will be critical to the success of the collaboration initiative?
Has SharePoint been used casually, perhaps to host some departmental newsletters on an intranet but nothing terribly strategic?
How satisfied are your employees with the SharePoint user experience? Have they been using it effectively, or are they frustrated?
Would adding social collaboration around the existing SharePoint experiences make them more effective?
Finding the intersection of SharePoint and Yammer
As of this writing, Microsoft is promising a “converged experience,” merging user interface elements of Yammer and SharePoint, arriving first in the Office365 cloud version of the product. Parallel features are expected in the on-premises version of SharePoint, but not at the same pace.
Questions for your Microsoft sales representative may include
Will Microsoft continue to invest in the SharePoint social newsfeed? Will it be competitive with the features offered by Yammer?
Will Microsoft ever provide an on-premises version of Yammer? (Probably not, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.)
What exactly is Microsoft doing to more deeply integrate Yammer with SharePoint? For example, how will the integration extend beyond the home screen news feed to encompass SharePoint document management, project management, and user profile data and functions?
Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer also raises a great many questions about the future of NewsGator Social Sites, an enterprise social networking product that works as an application running on top of SharePoint. Although NewsGator continues to race ahead with social networking features that go beyond those provided by even the latest edition of SharePoint, it is seeking other ways of distinguishing itself, including the addition of some of its own cloud-based extensions. At the same time, one of the things many SharePoint shops find attractive about NewsGator’s software is that it does not force them to move to the cloud.
Because these products are interdependent, any further change in Microsoft’s road map for SharePoint and Yammer could force changes in NewsGator’s plans, as could competitive pressures from dozens of other players. That makes studying this matrix of plans like studying the roadmap of a region subject to frequent earthquakes and judging which branches in the road are most likely to crumble.
The example of NewsGator, SharePoint, and Yammer interweaving is only one example of the interplay between social software players and their shifting plans.
Here are some possible strategies for navigating this maze.
Using SharePoint as your social platform
A couple years ago, calling SharePoint your enterprise social network would get you laughed out of a convention of community managers. Without heavy customization or the use of an add-on product, SharePoint simply wasn’t competitive.
With SharePoint 2013, though, the product has done a lot of catching up in how it manages profiles, activity streams, and people searches, as well as offering an apps model for extending the platform.
Microsoft has also been talking about ways for SharePoint and Yammer to be used together (even though Yammer is a cloud product and most SharePoint instances run inside a corporate firewall).
So where does that leave those IT managers who don’t want their collaboration apps to touch the cloud with a 10-foot pole? This is where understanding the product roadmap and judging how far to trust it becomes important. Will Microsoft continue to invest in social features for SharePoint itself, or will all that energy go into Yammer?
Extending SharePoint
Another option is to stick with SharePoint as the core but extend it with another product, such as NewsGator Social Sites. NewsGator is built as a SharePoint application, giving it the tightest possible integration with the platform.
I have spoken with many enterprises that chose to align with NewsGator when it was one of a very few options for making a SharePoint-based enterprise social network measure up. Even with the introduction of SharePoint 2013, those I’ve spoken with remain confident of NewsGator’s capability to innovate with social features faster than Microsoft will.
Linking SharePoint to your social platform
The more common strategy among social collaboration vendors is to seek ways of linking to or embedding content from SharePoint into their platforms and vice versa. For starters, a SharePoint web page can be referenced with a link in the social stream just like any other web page. Another approach, which Yammer was leveraging since before the acquisition, is to provide a SharePoint Web Part UI component that pulls in a social feed, such as a Yammer discussion thread relevant to the topic of a particular SharePoint page.
Deeper levels of integration are also possible. For example, the Jive for SharePoint add-on module reconfigures Jive to use SharePoint as the content repository for file storage. In addition, activity feeds can be integrated between Jive and SharePoint (subject to some restrictions in the SharePoint security model), according to Jive.
Scrapping SharePoint
Another option is to replace SharePoint wholesale with a social collaboration platform if the social platform is really compelling and your commitment to SharePoint was never all that deep. Usually, when a social software vendor boasts to me about replacing SharePoint, I find that the product may have replaced one particular use of SharePoint, but hundreds of other instances of the software still rattle around the organization.
Even if you make a strategic commitment to social collaboration not based on SharePoint, it probably doesn’t make sense to chase down every SharePoint instance being used as a glorified file server and rip it out. What makes more sense is to demonstrate the value of your social collaboration platform of choice, dramatically enough that employees and their managers will realize that’s where all the important content needs to be, going forward. Over time, old SharePoint servers may wind up being decommissioned and their content transferred over.
Again, the point is not necessarily to deploy new technology but to prove the value of new ways of working, enabled by technology. Whether that goal is best served by building on SharePoint or scrapping it is up to you.