I was with a customer the other day who very succinctly described their business motivation for delivering an Enterprise 2.0 intranet. “We’re looking to expand, but without increasing management costs”.

Employees who are efficiently networked don’t need management making sure that they’re talking to the right people, or introducing them to other members of the organisation.

They don’t need to attend team meetings with the “enforced networking” sessions that invariably happen afterward.

They don’t need to ask their manager who they need to ask about abc, or where they can find information about xyz.

They find that information from the flow that social software generates – their personal radar enables them to know who to ask and where to look.

Despite Lotus Connections being a great option for organisations looking to deploy a social software platform, it does not include any wiki functionality. This is going to be remedied in a Summer release, but for organisations looking to get started now it remains a significant functionality gap. To compensate, IBM have worked with Atlassian Confluence and Socialtext to integrate those wikis into Connections.

At Headshift, we’ve been looking at how this integration works, and how organisations can use Confluence and Socialtext within Connections. The screenshots below use Confluence, although it works very similarly with Socialtext.

Once the integration is set up (no easy task, you may need some help!), you are given the option of creating an associated wiki when you create a community, shown below.

Once the Community is created, two new areas are added to the Community. A link to the wiki space itself and the feed from the wiki. This wiki has been created for us automatically by Confluence.

If we click on the “Confluence Wiki” link, we are taken directly to our new wiki in Confluence and can add some content.

We now see that content in the Community.

So far, so good, but we’ve also found some limitations.

• Both the wiki and Lotus Connections must use the same LDAP.
• You can only create a new wiki, you cannot use an existing wiki. A workaround could be to create your Community and move content from an existing wiki into your new one, but that is far from ideal.
• When you click on the “Confluence Wiki” link, it takes you directly into the Confluence UI, leaving Connections behind. The only way back is the back button – it may not be obvious for novice users how to return to Connections.
• There is no single sign-on. Even though the two systems use the same LDAP, if you click on “Confluence Wiki” you need to sign in before you can edit any content.

There is a more serious issue in how content is presented in the Community, especially once you get to a certain level of complexity.

Here is a screenshot of a basic structure of our wiki in the Enterprise 2.0 community

You can see that there are three children. However, when shown in Connections they appear at the same level as the Home page. Connections shows a list of all pages, and doesn’t show page hierarchy.

Further the links highlighted above do not resolve correctly. They refer to the Connections server, not the Confluence server.

It gets worse when you add images / attachments…

Translates to:

So, our recommendation is that to display simple wiki content, this approach works, but once you go beyond the basics there are some limitations. We’d be more than happy to take a look at your Confluence and Lotus Connections environments, and help plan the best approach for you – so get in touch if we can help.

Until recently, organisations who wanted to implement social software or “Enterprise 2.0″ faced the task of integrating various best of breed components. You might take a wiki, a blog, an enterprise RSS server, and glue them all together. This is still a viable solution in some cases, but in the last 12 months social software platforms have matured to the extent that they are now a viable offering.

The three leaders in this space are Jive Clearspace, Lotus Connections and Socialtext. Having used all three, I thought I’d take a look at what they offer, how you might decide which was right for you, and how to get started. This is not intended to be a thorough review of all the features. Some social software elements are starting to become a commodity, the ability to have a profile, follow people, tag content etc. are common to all, even though they might be implemented slightly differently. Instead the focus is on what separates them, and commercial and technical reasons to help you decide which to go for.

We have all three set up and installed at Headshift Towers, if anyone wants to come in and take a look / discuss in more detail please get in touch, we’d love to show you.

So, in no particular order…

Jive Clearspace

Of all the three, Jive is the most ’rounded’ of platforms. This is not to say it is the best! Often, a platform which has an obvious quick-win, key usage can generate better adoption than a general purpose system. 

Jive’s legacy is forums software, and as such the ‘Discussion’ component is very strong. Whilst discussions can be about anything users are gently pushed toward using them to ask questions. Responses can be marked as correct or helpful which translate into points so that you can identify the most useful people as well as the most accurate content. This is tightly integrated into people’s profiles, and neither Connections or SocialText offer this ‘rating’ mechanism (although it is questionable whether all organisations would welcome that in their culture). Responses can be tagged, discussions are RSS enabled and can be converted into documents. This is much stronger than the Communities forums in Connections, and Socialtext doesn’t really have the concept. If discussion forums are an important part of your plans, then Jive definitely deserves a closer look.

Jive is also unique in having a specific offering for communities and social software outside the firewall. This is sold as a separate product, Clearspace Community, and has several high profile public sites. This is essentially the same technology, configured more for public access than private collaboration. If you have an external social software strategy as well as internal, there may be benefits in using the same platform for both.

Both Clearspace and Clearspace Community, like Socialtext, and priced on a subscription model, rather than perpetual license + annual maintenance, although there is a hosted option available. Technically speaking it is a J2EE application which runs on a variety of application servers. It is also highly extensible via its plug-in architecture and is far and away the most customisable of all the platforms.

Lotus Connections

A product from IBM can generate two extreme reactions. Some find comfort in an organisation the size of IBM, others have an instant dislike of IBM Software, especially Lotus software. What is clear, is that Lotus Connections is not your average IBM Software product. I would 100% guard against any ideological reaction against the fact that it comes from the Lotus brand. It has absolutely nothing to do with Notes/Domino from a technical perspective, and is a J2EE application which sits on IBM WebSphere. To reject it on the basis of the fact it has Lotus in the title, whatever your feeling about past Lotus offerings, would be a big mistake.

If Jive’s legacy and background is forums, then IBM’s is Profiles. IBM has effectively productised its internal directory and profiling platform (known as BluePages) making Connections exceptionally strong in terms of finding expertise. It has a very powerful social bookmarking feature (Dogear) which again is focused on helping you find people who have tagged pages with a certain topic. Scalability is proven given IBM has rolled the product out internally to its 300,000+ workforce. IBM has also been open about the future of the product, with Twitter-like status updates, wiki functionality (a big gap at the minute compared to SocialText and Jive) and a “river” of news similar to the Facebook news feed keeping you up to date with activity from across your network. This will not be released until the Summer at the earliest, and despite Connections being a light-weight product compared to the rest of IBM’s offerings, Jive and Socialtext work to a 2-4 week release cycle, compared to IBM.

A unique feature of Connections is the concept of Activities, think of it as social software task management. This integrates very well into Notes if you are a Notes user, but can still be useful for other platforms. IBM has done a lot of work integrating into non-IBM platforms such as Outlook and OS X with other products recently, and I would expect this to continue with Connections.

Whilst you can customise the look and feel by changing the CSS, the core functionality is not really customisable at all. However, you can develop and install different Widgets (including Google Gadgets) onto the homepage, and customise the functionality in that way.

What does differentiate Connections is that you can easily surface Connections content in other applications (including Sharepoint). Connections can become a social operating system, where the services (such as tagging) can be used by other applications. Connections is unmatched in terms of being able to develop completely separate third party applications (in whatever technology you like, as long as it can call a web service) using the services provided by Connections.

Update – I have since been made aware that the Socialtext API can perform a similar function in terms of creating third party applications.

A huge advantage of IBM’s commercial model is the fact that of the three it is the only one to offer a perpetual license (priced per user). After this, you pay a maintenance charge to give you free support and free upgrades (including major versions) which is usually ~17% of your license charge. Jive and Socialtext both work on a subscription basis. Whilst the pilot is fairly easy to install, you will definitely need help setting up a production environment (see my guide for help, but it’s worth getting someone in who knows what they’re doing).

Socialtext

Socialtext’s background is wiki technology, and if you’re looking for social software with a wiki at its heart then Socialtext could well be for you. They have wisely added social functionality around the wiki, rather than try to twist the wiki into a social platform and get it to do something it was not designed for. SocialCalc also looks highly interesting (a spreadsheet wiki) once it comes out of beta.

Of all the three platforms, Socialtext has the strongest status/Twitter/micro-blogging offering called Social Signals. You can choose to receive signals from just your contacts or from your entire organisation. Socialtext is unmatched in its ability to collaborate on documents due to its wiki background, but it is newest to the social software platform, and lacks some of the basics such as discussion forums.

A fascinating upcoming feature is an Adobe Air client for Socialtext, similar to Twhirl for Twitter. I’m quite excited by this, as I believe that my personal engagement Twitter has increased dramatically since I started using a desktop client. This could be a great way to increase engagement with Social Signals and the general feed of what is going on within your Socialtext platform.

Other strengths of Socialtext include its mobile access, the ability to email content into the system, and the capability to download content off-line to work when disconnected and then synchronise back up. It also has good connections into Sharepoint.

Socialtext has the quickest release cycle of all three, and as the software is managed by Socialtext even if it is hosted on a customer site this doesn’t create administrative problems. The downside is that this means that Socialtext functionality is not customisable. As it is an appliance  you cannot get under the hood with the code, and Socialtext push code updates which make customisations difficult. Connections code cannot be changed either, only Jive provides a plug-in architecture. As with Connections though, you can add widgets to the dashboard, including OpenSocial, and Socialtext also includes a powerful REST API, which means you can create third party applications similar to Connections. Further, reported bugs / suggested improvements can be released exceptionally quickly and the organisation is highly open to those discussions.

Socialtext works on a subscription model, either a software as a service or intriguingly as an appliance, which can be hosted onsite or by Socialtext and all maintenance/upgrades are managed by Socialtext. It is not available as pure on-premise software.

Conclusion

All three are mature social software platforms worthy of consideration. In summary:

Jive – strongest discussion feature, the most depth in terms of customisation, the most “rounded” in terms of general use, has “Community” offering for public-facing projects. Subscription based pricing.

Connections - strongest profile features, excellent at finding expertise. One-off perpetual license model. Significant improvements coming in the Summer release. Can be used as a social operating system to power other applications

Socialtext – strongest wiki and status features, has offline capability and Sharepoint integration. Available as an appliance. Desktop client could have a dramatic impact on adoption

We’re more than happy to demonstrate these platforms and help you decide which is for you. We also have quick-start offerings to help you set up a pilot with any of these technologies.

I’d also be interested in hearing from people who are currently using these platforms, and whether they agree / disagree with this roundup.

As with all industries at the moment, Enterprise 2.0 is trying to reposition itself as the one essential thing that you need in a recession. Michael Sampson wrote recently on how to manage your business in a recession, and one of his key points was to reduce costs using on-line meetings:

“Meetings that are more about co-creation of content than discussion and decision making can be supported through online meeting tools like Citrix GoToMeeting, LotusLive Meetings, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and many more (my personal favorite is Citrix GoToMeeting — it just always works!). Co-writing of documents, looking over an upcoming presentation, brainstorming about market opportunities, and more … all can be supported just as well through online meeting tools, for about $40 per month.”

I have used a variety of these sorts of systems, and in general they work well within an enterprise, until you want to involve people outside your firewall. Webinars are an excellent way to get your message out to key customers at very low cost if done correctly. If done incorrectly, they are a nightmare for both parties.

I’ve just come off a failed webinar powered by WebEx, which I understand is the market leader for these kind of things. In all fairness, I think virtually any webinar broadcast over the internet that I have attended has had huge problems (with the exception of Adobe Acrobat Connect – Jive Software use this and it rocks, haven’t seen much uptake elsewhere though).

Two areas that are absolutely essential for successful marketing webinars (which didn’t happen today) are:

1. The presentations must scale to the resolution of the webinar attendee. Many organisations with several people attending the webinar may want to meet together and project (800 x 600) the content
2. The audio must work. In all the webinars I’ve attended this fails so often. I know that Lotus Sametime and Microsoft OCS suffer as they use ports that most corporate firewalls don’t open. If you’re offering a webinar to keep costs low then making me dial-in doesn’t work.

Interestingly, more lightweight, SaaS solutions such as Lotus Live, and Dimdim (who get bonus points for reaching out to me via Twitter minutes after posting my frustration with WebEx) seem to be coming out on the market, and as mentioned previously I was very impressed with Adobe Connect.

Dimdim’s tagline is “Web conferencing that just works” – that’s what we need! I’d be interested if anyone has used them, and may give them a try next time I host a webinar, so that my customers don’t go and blog about not being able to listen!