There’s been a lot of noise about online collaboration tools / Enterprise 2.0 / Knowledge Management, and we have seen a lot of products in the space. There are players ranging from the traditional Enterprise tools vendors like IBM and Microsoft with all encompassing heavy products, to a bunch of start-ups with their wares trying to get a share of the pie by solving a piece of the problem. The following is a list of a few tools in the Enterprise 2.0 space:
Sharepoint by Microsoft
Lotus Connections by IBM
SocialText (A ‘social wiki’ wiki with sharepoint integration)
ConnectBeam (Social Bookmarking that integrates with search)
Atlassian (Enterprise wiki with a lot of social features)
and many others
While Sharepoint is a last generation tool in its AJAX-y avatar, IBM’s product and those by the start-ups are true blue web 2.0 products which supposedly adhere to the web2.0 tenets of openness, sharing and usability and attemp to bring them to how people collaborate at workplaces. Such a tool can, potentially, help an enterprise:
1. Unlock knowledge hidden in day to day interactions
2. Make knowledge available for later use which would otherwise have been lost
3. Discover people with expertise
4. Promote retention, cohesion within the work place
While the potential use cases of these tools are very interesting, enterprise wide adoption and utility is something that I think is still to be proven. I would really like the inputs from the community here about their experience with using these or similar tools. Maybe we can have the discussion around the following points:
1. Which tool have you tried, and what have been the benefits.
2. How has the adoption been? How keen are employees to leave their previous ways of interacting, and shift to these collaboration tools?
3. Do you have a wish-list of features that you would like to see in a collaboration tool for your workplace?
And of course, anything else that you might want to add.
- CC is Evil - June 24, 2011
- Launching GrexIt – Your shared email memory - August 17, 2010
- Enterprise Collaboration tools: Adoption and Benefits? - December 10, 2008
hey check out http://www.httpfuse.com, which is again based on collaborative updation of links
As we had specific requirements and none of the tools meeted our expectations at that moment, we developed our own – http://www.comindwork.com. The adoption? Well i can say that any change is difficult for company especially like starting using enterprise tools, so the tools should be easy to leatn with very good support. And today i think it is very important that you can intgeate other tools in your system, as well as provide the ability to integrate yours.
Enterprise collaboration tools can be a key glue in unlocking the data sitting between departmental silos within a large enterprise. However, the dollary-heavy, vendor-driven enterprise collaboration tools face issues like a. upfront installation costs b. learning curve for adoption c. structuring of data stored and d. IT involvement
It really becomes impossible to convince the CIO for a $250K-$500K price tag of TCO for these tools (licensing, training, IT support, hardware, etc.) esp. during the recessionary trends, it becomes a neh.
I recommend a very simple strategy for enterprise collaboration:
1. Start bottoms up. Install a Wiki (DIY MediaWiki install) and a blog (WP/MT) within your department (50-100 people) on a cheap linux/windows box.
2. Have a basic structure for a wiki like Projects, Campaigns (if Marketing deptt.) or start with your deptt. objectives as the structure and drill down. Don’t worry much at the upfront, let people capture the data then you can refactor.
3. Organize a 1-day workshop and show them pedal/metal and tell them why. Tell them how they would now know what other people are doing without nagging them and how they can be heard throughout the company.
4. If the above is successful, make a case for a larger adoption to your Veep, CIO. Give your CIO/CXO a blog too, he’ll be happy to shout from his new found podium.
I implemented the above first hand in 2004 back when I worked for Symantec and was semi-successful, and to help me organize the thoughts for my pitch, I coined a phrase called Writable Intranet which has now become a synonym for Enterprise 2.0 and has also been covered in Subrah Iyer’s (Co-Founder WebEx) book.
Lastly, you can comfortably stay away from the packaged vendor products. There are loads of other opensource tools available for tagging (flickr-like, delicious like), rating (digg-like), messaging (jabber-esque), etc.
Would love to talk more and share notes. You can also catch me live on twitter at http://twitter.com/1ndus
Indus Khaitan
CTO, SezWho, Inc.
Bangalore
Hi Niraj,
Good point. One of the things that will drive an enterprise 2.0 tool’s adoption is usability and experience. ROI is a given and we all know that using a system is better than not using one. In addition, a free trial is very important. Let the early adopters in a company try out the service before inviting other people. Personally, enterprise tools need to look, act and feel more like their consumer web2.0 counterparts. Make adoption quick, easy and fun.
The next set of features in a collaboration tool will be “social” in nature and interact will extend the app/service beyond itself.
Cheers,
Sahil
Founder, DeskAway.com
SharePoint is the great platform for enterprise document management and collaboration, and the integration application on SharePoint lets organisations to keep IT platform up with their business development and requirement in the future.
nSynergy assist here as we specialise in developing and implementing SharePoint – that’s all we do. For more information about SharePoint and nSynergy, you can visit http://www.nsynergy.com.