Social software sustains collaboration

Because many roles are defined elsewhere in enterprise systems, ease of integration with those software products is important. That integration allows the outcomes of certain transactions to be carried into the social platform. "Vendors should make the integration process easy by having the APIs exposed, but not all of them do this," Ingham says.

Other considerations

Ease of use is an important criterion in the evaluation process. "People should not have to require training to participate in the social collaboration process," Ingham stresses. "A well-designed, simple but functionally effective interface is essential, for both the user and the administrative side."

Analytics and reporting should be considered in assessing options. "Keeping track of users' participation is important from two viewpoints," Ingham says. "Individual members can receive recognition through ‘badging' that indicates they are frequent contributors or their discussions are highly rated, and executives in the organization can view dashboards that summarize overall community activity and usage trends."

Finally, the stability of the contending software vendors is a key consideration. That step is especially important with social collaboration software because so many of the products are new. "You want to have confidence that the product will still be around in five years," Ingham says.

Organizations of all kinds are increasingly realizing that the best way to stay competitive is to use their collective knowledge to support productivity and innovation. The final result remains to be seen, but evidence is mounting that knowledge workers are becoming more open to sharing knowledge. The availability of tools to share in a more person-centric environment is providing the means to do that.

Social software virtualized

Socialtext recently announced a new product, the Socialtext Virtual Appliance, that provides the option of deploying Socialtext software on VMware. VMWare produces virtualization solutions that include data center virtualization, virtualization and cloud management software, and disaster recovery. Virtualization separates physical resources from functional performance. One of the most significant benefits of virtualization is that servers are used more efficiently because they do not need to be dedicated to a consistent set of applications. For example, several different operating systems can be run on one server.

Viewed as more secure than the public cloud because it operates behind the firewall, private cloud computing is often one of the first steps an organization takes in cloud deployment. Gartner has reported that 76 percent of IT departments plan to invest in private cloud technologies by next year. The new Socialtext offering allows companies that have virtualization in place to leverage that technology for social software functions. In addition to the new virtual product, Socialtext hosts its social software in its own cloud and on a private, on-premise cloud that uses a hardware appliance.