Salesforce.com Chatter – Yet another platform for Enterprise Social Networking

jdb — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:43:43 +0000

Today, Marc Benioff , Salesforce.com’s CEO, unveiled Salesforce.com’s Enterprise Social Networking platform. The platform supports employee profiles, status updates from people, a conduit for applications to write updates to either a group or a person’s stream and an API which can be used to extend these capabilities beyond what’s already provided. Although, Salesforce.com is touting this to be one of their biggest offering in years, the current offering only offers a rudimentary framework. The current Chatter offering is very one dimensional, say compared to Cisco’s offering (read about it here), and provides capabilities that are very text based. This is definitely not an all encompassing enterprise level social collaboration platform, but does it need to be?

Salesforce.com is what it is today, because they provided a means for the developer community to develop and extend Salesforce.com’s offering. This is most likely their strategy for the new Chatter platform as well. From that perspective, Chatter would do well. It provides an extensible and secure API to feed in updates into the various channel. One interesting possibility is to integrate CoTweet like functionality into Salesforce.com and manage twitter chatter that way.

See Salesforce.com’s video describing Chatter:

In the video, one possibility that Salesforce.com talks about is getting in feeds from various backend systems, like SAP, Peoplesoft, etc. Although this sounds interesting, and is useful for smaller players, it would be unthinkable for larger companies to implement both from a security and volume perspective.

Photo by na.presseportal on Flickr

Cisco’s Foray into Enterprise Social Networking

jdb — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:20:25 +0000

Recently, John Chambers, CEO Cisco, unveiled Cisco’s Innovation in the enterprise social networking and collaboration space. Although, I hadn’t in the past thought of Cisco to be one of the players leading the charge on enterprise social networking, Chambers was unveiling the many products they’ve packaged together to provide a comprehensive platform for supporting enterprise social networking and collaboration. Although, I am extremely pleased with what Cisco is doing in the tele/video collaboration space, I am not all that convinced about their other offerings in the enterprise social networking space.

Firstly, web 2.0 technologies are still very much evolving. Plunking down a lot of money to get something that is a combination of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc may not be the most ideal toolset for supporting a vibrant and organic social network in the enterprise (while at the same time boosting productivity). Additionally, even with a successful social networking program implemented at an organization, one cannot fully rely on just the employees to tag and categorize data for consumption. Organizations, don’t have the critical mass (as is typically found on digg.com, twitter, etc) to self organize user generated content. This means that organizations have to invest in either manpower or provide some additional tools to self organize such information. It would be great if Cisco provided some tools to organize data meaningfully.

All in all, I believe Cisco’s real focus is where it needs to be, which is in the tele/video collaboration space. They’ve simply built some familiar web 2.0 concepts to enhance their current collaboration experiences (and perhaps to even keep observers from complaining that they are not a cool forward looking company).

TechSized » social networking

Salesforce.com Chatter – Yet another platform for Enterprise Social Networking

Cisco’s Foray into Enterprise Social Networking