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Contents

1.0 Enterprise 2.0 ....................................................................................................................... 4

1.1 Introduction Enterprise ....................................................................................................... 4

1.2 The Origins of Enterprise 2.0 ............................................................................................. 4

1.3 Communication & Collaboration : The core of E 2.0 (Fertile land for KM) ........................ 5

1.4 Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0 : Differences in a Nutshell ............................................... 5

1.5 Pillars of Enterprise 2.0 ...................................................................................................... 5

1.5.1 Web 2.0 ...................................................................................................................... 6

1.5.2 Socialisation of business Applications ......................................................................... 6

1.5.3 Business Cultures ....................................................................................................... 6

1.6 Necessity of Enterprise 2.0 ................................................................................................. 6

1.7 Features of Enterprise 2.0 ................................................................................................... 7

1.8 Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 ................................................................................................... 8

1.9 Enterprise 2.0 in Oracle corporation ................................................................................... 9

1.10 Conclusion : Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledg 2.0? ................................................................... 10

2.0 Google Wave ...................................................................................................................... 11

2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 11

2.2 Google wave layers .......................................................................................................... 11

2.2.1 Product Layer .................................................................................................................. 11

2.2.2 Platform Layer .......................................................................................................... 11

2.2.3 Protocol Layer .......................................................................................................... 11

2.3 How wave technology can assist KM & Enterprise 2.0 ..................................................... 12

2.3.1 Wave: A communication and collaboration mashup ................................................. 12

2.3.3 Enterprise 2.0 is well supported by Google Wave. .................................................... 14

2.4 Conclusion............................................................................................................................. 14

3.0 Micro Messaging ................................................................................................................. 15

3.1 Use of Microblogging in Enterprise ................................................................................... 15

3.1.1 Internal use .............................................................................................................. 15

3.1.2 External use .............................................................................................................. 17

3.2 Key Considerations ........................................................................................................... 18

3.3 Current Players ................................................................................................................ 19

1.0 Enterprise 2.0

1.1 Introduction

The term ―Enterprise 2.0‖ (E2.0) describes a collection of organizational and information

technology (IT) constructs that enable more flexible work models, knowledge sharing, and

community building. E2.0 is not something totally new—rather, it represents the evolution

and maturation of best practices for collaboration and knowledge management (KM).

Realising the strength of Collaboration and participation, today organizations are re-

formulizing their strategies to attain distributed, agile and collaborative environment.

1.2 The Origins of Enterprise 2.0

The spring 2006 edition of MIT Sloan Management Review included an article by Professor

Andrew McAfee titled, ―Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.‖8 In the

article, McAfee posited that a particular collection of technologies was noteworthy because

the technologies appeared to address many of the shortcomings of traditional knowledge

worker tools used for communication, information sharing, and collaboration. These new

technologies (e.g., blogs and wikis) are more platform centric and are widely available on the

Internet. McAfee coined the term ―Enterprise 2.0‖ (E2.0) to call attention to social software

and platforms that organizations might deploy to improve the productivity or performance of

their knowledge workers. McAfee also argues that E2.0 tools make it easier for knowledge

workers to author, link, and tag information without imposing preconceived constructs on

those users in terms of formal categorization or structure. The notions of ―emergence,‖

freeform use, and network effects are critical underpinnings of the E2.0 paradigm outlined in

the MIT Sloan Management Review article. McAfee goes on to state that these new E2.0 tools

augment existing communication, information sharing, and collaboration platforms. The

article does not focus only on the technology aspects of E2.0. The need to address cultural

dynamics is acknowledged, as is the need to alleviate ―walled gardens‖ created in a political

or unilateral manner by management (versus valid barriers erected to support security,

identity, compliance, and other business requirements).

A Refinement

In May 2006, McAfee published a modified version of his E2.0 definition. The exact quote is

as follows:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or

between companies and their partners or customers. Social software enables people to

rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form

online communities. (Wikipedia's definition.)Platforms are digital environments in which

contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time‖

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the

patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time. Freeform

means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional

• Free of up-front workflow

• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities

• Accepting of many types of data

1.3 Communication & Collaboration: The core of E 2.0 (Fertile land for

KM)

The Gist of Enterprise 2.0 is about communication and Collaboration. The premise is that the

more easily people can communicate – with other workers, team members, customers,

vendors, clients – the less information will be siloed. When information is free, people can

get more feedback and input (collaborate), react more quickly (agility), and make better

decisions. This is the opportunity inherent in Enterprise 2.0: a more efficient, productive and

intelligent workforce. The following discussions and features depict how Enterprise 2.0 is

related with knowledge management.

1.4 Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0: Differences in a Nutshell

Enterprise 1.0 Enterprise 2.0

Hierarchy Flat Organization

Friction Ease of Organization flow

Bureaucracy Agility

Inflexibility Flexibility

IT-driven technology User-driven technology

Top down Bottom up

Centralized Distributed

Teams are in one building/one Time Zone Teams are global

Silos and Boundaries Fuzzy boundaries, Open borders

Information systems are structured and

dictated

Information systems are emergent

Taxonomies Folksonomies

Overly Complex Simple

Closed/Proprietary standards Open

Scheduled On demand

1.5 Pillars of Enterprise 2.0

The three driving factors of Enterprise 2.0 are

1. Web 2.0 Technologies

2. Socialization of Enterprise Applications

3. Business cultures that enable companies to take full advantage of technology.

1.5.1 Web 2.0

The term "Web 2.0" is commonly associated with web applications which facilitate

interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on

the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted

services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups

and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change

website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive

viewing of information that is provided to them.

The term is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0

conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it

does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in

the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Social media are now key pieces of

the corporate arsenal – from internal communications to marketing plans.

1.5.2 Socialisation of business Applications

Web 2.0 is the main facilitator for socialisation of business applications. That is it moves

from data-centric models to people-driven applications. Businesses are realizing the value is

not in the data itself but in how people are using it. Social applications are meeting this

demand – bringing data to the right people, allowing them to interact with it and helping them

understand it. The end result is the ability to make better (and faster) decisions – a key

differentiator in a challenging economy.

1.5.3 Business Cultures

The third key to Enterprise 2.0 – new business cultures –possibly the most important element.

By definition, social applications rely on the people using them. Without changing the way

corporations and their people behave, it’s impossible to free workers and information and

achieve agility and increased productivity. A major obstacle is that Enterprise 2.0 requires

management to give up control. It has become unrealistic for corporate communication

departments to dictate employees’ every word to customers when communication is

happening in real time on blogs, Twitter and forums. Similarly, managers cannot control what

employees say on the corporate wiki. But giving employees the freedom to speak their mind

and voice ideas is required for there to be a harnessing of collective intelligence. The

employees must adapt as well. If they are given the freedom, but do not feel comfortable

Participating and collaborating, social applications can never reach their full potential.

1.6 Necessity of Enterprise 2.0

Most new business models are based on mass customization and customer self-

service. Organizations routinely outsource activities and collaborate with partners and

customers to innovate.

Demographics have changed. Customers are very comfortable with technology and

are ―always on.‖ Moreover, a new generation of people—one that has never not been

connected to the internet—is entering the workforce and moving into management

positions.

Technologies are open and collaborative in nature; so that end users can combine

various tools can by assembling, disassembling and reassembling applications.

Across the organization, people want to participate in corporate decisions and prefer

to be intensely involved in any form of organizational change.

Demographic changes and innovation in business models are highly interconnected.

The manager as a digital consumer, the growing importance of information, and the

rise of contingent workers are driving businesses to adopt new models.

When generated from customers and shared with them, information and instant

feedback allows businesses to get the most from their customer relationships.

Feedback and information sharing become loyalty instruments, key channels for

gathering business intelligence, and new ways for engaging with—rather than simply

selling to—the customer.

The next-generation enterprise is an extended enterprise, where multiple stakeholders

collaborate to deliver results to a shared target audience— the consumers

Customers are effectively directing the organization’s processes. They choose which

customer contact channel is used at each process step, and they execute those tasks at

a convenient time for them

Information must not be exclusive to management, but should be seen as a factor of

production that provides the glue for a complete and competent performance network.

Hierarchical communication of essential business information is no longer effective or

efficient. Instead, existing technology should be leveraged to make relevant

information available so that all workers who need the information can consume,

modify, and replicate it.

1.7 Features of Enterprise 2.0

An Enterprise 2.0 technology strategy combines the different aspects of Web 2.0

capabilities into a secure and comprehensive platform where business conversations

and tasks are executed in the context of business goals.

The successful Enterprise 2.0 platform is modular in its architecture so companies can

add the components, resources, and services that are required as the business evolves

and grows.

The rich Enterprise 2.0 platform must enable enterprise applications to participate in

the business conversation

In addition to higher productivity, providing information within its context leads to

increased worker participation. That, in turn, generates a richer, improved context for

others users to leverage in their work conversations.

1.8 Benefits of Enterprise 2.0

The above figure describes the potential benefits of enterprise 2.0 to an organization. It

envisions a bottom up approach where individual worker gets more freedom to express his

thought and getting a chance to circulate among his colleagues. A word of appreciation or

usage of his content would really encourage him for further collaboration. Areas are wide

open and no boundary is fixed on one’s thought.

While the chain of command is still relevant for managing people and setting strategic

direction, it does not work for optimizing business results and solving problems. The current

generation of professionals and managers use social networks within the organization to

accomplish tasks and achieve their goals.

By their nature, these tools don't involve complex deployment and maintenance. You may be

able to install pieces incrementally, starting small with an internal program before opening it

up to outside participation. The tools are generally easy enough to use that they require little

or no training. Unlike desktop deployments, using the Web to deploy enterprise tools means

employees can access their critical data-whether that's documents, RSS feeds, bookmarks or

whatever-wherever they are, so long as they have Internet access.

Enterprise 2.0 also provides new avenues to open up a conversation with partners, suppliers

or customers. Communication flows both ways, enabling you to share information and ideas.

With these technologies, you could ask customers for pictures or videos using your products

in interesting ways (and thus build brand equity with your customer base). Or you could share

information with partners who are working on a project with your company. You can easily

start a blog or wiki for a specific product category, enabling a small niche of your market to

communicate, a process that would have been much more difficult and expensive using

earlier Web tools.

Following activities describe how knowledge is captured, stored and disseminated within an

organizational setup.

Eg: How social software helps in administering a project in an organization

a. Collect and prioritize requirements in to wiki

b. Post status reports and minutes on the Blog

c. Communicate within the team via microblogging

d. Remain up to date via RSS

Social software facilitates in all domains like process Management, team organization,

Documentation, project Management as discussed above, requirement management, platform

for posting ideas and innovation etc. Thus sharing knowledge become the side effect of one’s

work.

1.9 Enterprise 2.0 in Oracle Corporation

Oracle addresses this market need with an Enterprise 2.0 platform that provides the industry’s

most complete, open, and manageable portfolio of Web 2.0 and user-interaction capabilities.

The platform includes rich Web 2.0 services for communication, collaboration, structured and

unstructured information management, and social networking. These Web 2.0 services power

Enterprise 2.0-enabled applications that spur knowledge workers to greater productivity and

innovation in the workplace.

1.10 Conclusion: Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge 2.0?

Enterprise 2.0 is the perfect environment where Knowledge Management system can run

smoothly. With Enterprise 2.0 much of knowledge capture happens as a by product of using

transparent searchable tools for common workflow and collaboration tasks. These tools

enable employees to give and take information and the flexibility of the tool allows for very

dynamic usage. So it can be say that Enterprise 2.0 strategy is a twin brother of KM strategy

or Enterprise 2.0= Knowledge 2.0.

2.0 Google Wave

2.1 Introduction

Google Wave is a real-time communication and collaboration platform that incorporates

several types of web technologies, including email, instant messaging (IM), wiki, online

documents, and gadgets.

Google Wave itself represents a new approach aimed at improving communication and

collaboration through the use of a combination of established and emerging web

technologies. Google generally describes Google Wave as a platform, and in a broader

context, as a set of three interdependent layers:

2.2 Google wave layers

2.2.1 Product Layer

The Google Wave product is the web application people use to access and edit waves. It's an

HTML 5 application, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other

functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right

into a wave). Most people using Google Wave during the public preview will be accessing

the product layer. Throughout the remainder of the article I will refer to this product as the

Google Wave Client.

2.2.2 Platform Layer

Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow

developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work

inside waves.

2.2.3 Protocol Layer

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing

waves, and includes the ―live‖ concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected

instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that

anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service.

To encourage adoption of the protocol, Google has made the code behind Google Wave open

source.

The combination of these three layers represents a fairly comprehensive offering that is

readily accessible to a large number of users with varying degrees of technical proficiency.

Figure shows how each layer is represented and the likely audience that will utilize each

layer.

2.3 How wave technology can assist KM & Enterprise 2.0

Wave’s relevance to the enterprise might seem premature with so many of the early and

current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging,

mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after

their inception. The real question is whether there are really such significant gaps in the

current state of Web-based communication that we need something new like Wave.

2.3.1 Wave: A communication and collaboration mashup

Google Wave itself consists of a dynamic mix of conversation models and highly interactive

document creation via the browser. Using simple, open Web technologies (Google makes

much of the fact that most of Google Wave is a open set of formats and architectures that is

jointly developed with the Web community) Wave combines many of the key features of e-

mail, instant messaging, media sharing, and social networking into a seamless experience and

data set that are eponymously known as waves. All of this is opened up to developers via

the Google Wave API.

The demonstration at the introduction of Google Wave showed how users can interact in real-

time, collaboratively creating structured conversations that contain rich media, instant

notifications, simultaneous user editing of the conversation, and live integration with server-

side resources such as spell-checking and language translation. Most interestingly, while

waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they

are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for

distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing

applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the

information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world,

not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0

and Knowledge Management specifically.

An enterprise perspective of Google Wave

Let’s take a closer look at what enterprises need to know about Google Wave:

2.3.2 Google Wave largely complements and doesn’t replace existing communication

and collaborative applications.

Google Wave creates a healthy synthesis of existing application types by providing

integration across channels already in place. The early demos in fact showed how Twitter and

existing social networks can play very well with Google Wave, enhancing the experience and

allowing broader participation in a wave through other applications. Google Wave won’t

(necessarily) replace existing apps like e-mail, IM, blogs, or wikis, and can actually make the

latter two stronger through embedding. Groupware and other simultaneously collaborative

apps, however, are more at risk of displacement.

2.3.3 Enterprise 2.0 is well supported by Google Wave.

The general capabilities of FLATNESSES, my mnemonic for all the things that a capable

Enterprise 2.0 platform should do, is well embodied in Google Wave. While blogs and wikis

are the fundamental Enterprise 2.0 platforms, the basic capabilities of social interaction,

emergence, and freeformedness are all there, though a wave presupposes a bit more structure

and situated use than the more tabula rasa blog or wiki.

Some of the possible applications areas are

Project Waves: Bridge the gap between under-used project wiki page and the day-to-

day email and IM traffic among the project team. Get new project team members up

to speed quickly by having them “playback” the critical waves in the project

workspace.

Sales Waves: Collaborate on deals in an environment rich with context from CRM

system, embedded as gadgets within the wave. Turn everyone in an organization into

a member of a virtual account team that contributes ideas on how to do more business

with most important accounts.

Support Waves: Instead of customer support email, it is possible to make engage

customers in a wave that evolves as their needs change. Resolve their issue faster, and

create reusable waves for customers with similar problems.

2.4 Conclusion

Wave Technology, an open source technology developed by Google with enhanced social software

capabilities will surely make waves in Information Management and collaboration arena. Many

believes Wave technology will surely help KM wave.

3.0 Micro Messaging

After Twitter showed wild success on the Web, a number of firms, produced micro-

messaging tools for the enterprise. Also many enterprise collaboration suites are integrating

micro-messaging into their platforms They have made micro-messaging a feature rather than

a product.

Now experts in the social media space have been thinking about how businesses might adopt

enterprise micro blogging tools in Knowledge Management Arena .

3.1 Use of Enterprise microblogging

.

3.1.1 Internal use

Internal Use means using micro blogging platforms in a closed system within

organization.Enterprise knowledge management activities that can be managed using micro

messaging tools are as follows

Emergency Broadcast System: First and foremost, any company needs a way to

reach all of its employees quickly and efficiently. E-mail is obviously one way to do

this but increasingly, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. With many folks

receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, it can take minutes if not hours before we get to

an e-mail from the CEO.

Knowledge sharing : Here’s where things get interesting. One of the biggest failings

of many companies is the fact that they trap their intellectual property in Powerpoints,

spreadsheets and Word documents and store them on shared drives and e-mail

inboxes. Once the creator of that content walks out the door, the odds of their years of

work finding its way into anyone else’s life are slim. As companies start uploading

more and more content onto wikis, or central file repositories, these files can be linked

to and indexed by conversational tools like micro blogs.

Training: Any company that has gone on a hiring binge quickly realizes how painful

it is to train new employees. If a formal training program exists, the materials are

often outdated almost as soon as they are created. By identifying a few key

influencers and allowing new employees to see their daily ―streaming,‖ information

and best practices can be shared more easily and in real time with little burden on the

―trainer.‖

Expert Identification: Another area that many larger companies fall down is in

making their resident experts easily findable. If you can see your company’s

employees talking (possibly segmented by business unit or group within an

organization), it wouldn’t take long to figure out who knows what about whom.

Seeing the Connectors: Good companies spend a lot of time on succession planning.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a good handle on who the true connectors

are within their organization. By analyzing conversations and watching the

conversations of employees, senior managers can easily identify who these connectors

are and then ensure these employees compensation and titles match their internal

value AND start to add additional connectors if too much information is flowing

through any one individual.

Social networking

Especially in huge enterprises the question who is the right contact person for a

special topic is not answered easily. The problem: There are many experts but nobody

knows them. Conversation by micro blogging could be read company-wide. Thus you

will quickly recognize which employee is the right one for a specific topic.

Short internal notes

In every company there are short notes for the staff. Micro messaging is the best way

to circulate short internal notes within organization

Reporting

Since many microblogging platforms can be accessed via mobile phones you can report

from all over the world. Imagine a worker who is visiting a fair, joining a meeting or is

sitting in a conference. By using a mobile device news from events can be published for

the colleague in the office.

Distribute corporate culture

Can be used for orientation to new employees. Newcomers have a lot of questions. By

using micro blogging, Questions reaches a bigger audience and questions and answers

stay alive in the digital archive. Future newcomers can access this FAQ catalog too. With

every question asked this catalog will grow in a dynamical way. Personal conversation

(even with a micro blogging tool) makes employees familiar and connected with their

company. By doing so micro blogging helps employees to internalize and to actively

shape corporate culture.

Project management

Microblogging cannot substitute a project plan. But it can complement it. Each team

member can inform about the project’s progress without any technical barriers. Achieved

milestones can be reported as well as moved deadlines or unexpected incidents. With a

short status update everybody can indicate that the timetable is exposed.

Suggestion scheme

Micro blogging can be used to collect suggestions from everywhere. Quick, compact and

straightforward.

3.1.2 External use

Inclusion of External Stakeholders: Back in the early 2000’s, extranets were all the

rage. There would finally be a way for companies to include partners, investors and

even certain customers in their daily conversations. Portals obviously began to fill this

roll to a degree but none were ever truly conversational. Enter enterprise

microblogging with the ability to include these aforementioned stakeholders in the

mix. It is a very good tool to meet customers in web 2.0. with react to criticism,

questions and problems.

Marketing

Twitter (or other microblogging systems) gives you a great chance to present your

business to customers. You can inform about new products, publish corporate news or

emphasize cross media campaigns.

Monitoring/market research

Another benefit Twitter brings along is market research. Several services like

search.twitter.com, tweetbeep or TweetAlert give you the opportunity to see how

customers are thinking about your brand.

Watch the microblogging cosmos to identify critical and positive opinions about your

products, services or campaign.

Crisis management

If a crisis occurs a company must have a plan to react quick and effective.

Sales

Earn money via Twitter? Dell shows that it is possible. At http://twitter.com/DellOutlet

the hardware manufacture uses the microblogging platform as an outlet store. This use

case shows that you can convert 140 characters into real money.

In 2008 Dell made public that they earned 1.000.000 Dollar using Twitter.

Consequently Dell Outlet is not the only account used by Dell. A total of 34 Twitter

accounts is being used for digital marketing according to Dell’s homepage.

Recruiting/human resources (HR)

The personnel department can offer jobs at microblogging platforms. You can also refer

to fairs or other events where candidates can get in touch with your company.

On the other hand HR departments can search for experts who recommend them self by

expert posts.

3.2 Key Considerations

Enterprises considering microblogging as an internal function will have some common

requirements. Here is our take on several areas that corporations tend to look at when they are

considering a new technology:

Single Sign-On (SSO):

A growing problem in the social media world right now is identity proliferation. With some

notable exceptions that accept OpenID, most sites still require you to create yet another

account in their system (or identity domain). In most enterprises, a fair amount of effort has

already been expended on establishing single sign-on through the intranets’ LDAP registry. It

would be highly desirable to leverage this capability to enroll employees in the

microblogging system. So, an enterprise microblogging solution must have flexibility in

adapting to existing ID and sign-on registries.

Reliability:

Initially, microblogging may seem like a non-essential, nice-to-have kind of tool, but our bet

is that most businesses will find it very quickly becomes indispensable for keeping important

lines of communication open. People, on their own, will invent many different uses for such a

simple tool, as they have with Twitter. In a large corporation with geographically distributed

sites, it would be best to have a solution that allows each campus to run its own server and

not be dependent on a remote centralized service. These distributed servers would exchange

data to unify the system as a whole. See Distribution below.

Analytics:

Businesses will eventually want to analyze the traffic on their microblogging sites. They’ll

want to know who follows who, who posts the most and to who and most importantly, a

feature I’d love to have in Twitter, the ability to see and search all my posts and other posts

selectively for important information, just like we can search our G-mail accounts now.

Security:

This will probably be of paramount concern at least initially in most businesses. Most

corporations are very aware of keeping internal communications safe from prying outside

eyes. An enterprise microblogging solution must provide for fine-grained authorization and

trustworthy security of communications. Management, through the IT department will want

to be able to restrict who can see certain posts.

Scalability:

The word Enterprise covers a huge spectrum of organizations. An enterprise microblogging

solution should be scalable from less than 100 users to tens or even hundreds of thousands of

users, spread across the globe. The ability to distribute and federate many local servers on the

corporate intranet will help to satisfy this need.

Groups:

Enterprises comprise many different groups within their walls. Not just departments, but

project teams, ad hoc work groups, common interests, etc. An enterprise microblogging

solution must provide for the easy definition of groups or tags, where any employee user can

belong to many groups.

Distribution:

This requirement has been touched on already, but it should be mentioned again because of

its importance to other requirements. It refers to the ability of the enterprise microblogging

solution to be decentralized, spread out across wide geographic areas, and hence to become

fault tolerant, so the failure of any one node does not cause a failure of the whole system.

Interoperability:

Clearly a distributable enterprise microblogging solution would require its various nodes to

federate and interoperate, but a corporation wishing to allow interaction with its customer

base outside its walls would require a solution that interoperates with other microblogging

solutions that may exist, yet allows only some posts to be seen outside the corporate firewall.

3.3 Current Players

Until recently, most vendors in the community or social media space have either focused on

delivering microblogging tools to the public while software providers that focused on the

enterprise tools busied themselves with delivering better wikis and other collaboration tools.

Not anymore. A slew of start-ups (and one or two more tenured companies) have now turned

their attention to the less sexy but immediately more profitable enterprise microblogging

space. List of some of the major players in this space along with a quick description, pros and

cons of each are given below.

Yammer (from TradeVibes) Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more

productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ―What are

you working on?‖

PROS: Easy to turn on and screens out folks outside of the corporate domain. These guys

have obviously learned a thing or two from where some of the existing microblogging tools

fall down.

CONS: No single sign-on functionality (at least not that we could see). Tricky to add other

―partners/contractors‖ that don’t have e-mail addresses matching the corporate domain.

Hosted by outside company, can’t be deployed inside the firewall.

Laconi.ca An open source microblogging tool written in PHP that implements the Open

Micro Blogging standard. Laconica was created as an open source, distributed alternative to

Twitter, and was originally used by the identi.ca microblogging service.

PROS: Built on open source software so it’s completely customizable. It also integrates with

well-known Twitter client, Twhirl giving power users the ability to manage external and

internal facing microblogging activity in a seem less fashion. It is based on the Open

Microblogging protocol specification, so other implementations are possible.

CONS: As is the case with any open source application, its greatest asset (flexibility) is also

its biggest weakness (not super user-friendly out of the box). Scaling, federation and

interoperation have yet to be seriously tested.

Utterli (from Utterli.com) Utterli helps you create and follow discussions with friends or new

people with similar interests. You can create or join a discussion from any mobile phone or

computer. Utters are cool because they can be audio, video, pictures and text, and it’s really

easy to post to your other online profile pages.

PROS: Utterli’s two biggest strengths are easily its multi-media and mobile capabilities. It’s

fairly easy to create a ―group‖ on the fly and coming soon will be enterprise-friendly SSO

and security capabilities. Stay tuned for more on this front.

CONS: The least ―Twitter-like‖ out of any of the existing enterprise micro bloggers. We’re

not completely sure that’s actually a weakness.

Conclusion

Microblogging can find its place in business environment both for internal and external use.

Currently the number of users are still small. But a growth of 1382% in the last 12 month

(February 2008 to February 2009) shows that microblogging is rising quickly.

References:

1. F indings from the NASAsphere Pilot http://socialcast.s3.amazonaws.com/corporate/downloads/NASAsphereReportPublic.pdf

2. Making micro blogging a feature in your enterprise

http://www.enterprisemessagingnews.com/enterprisemessagingnews-79-

20090827MakingMicroMessagingAFeatureInYourEnterprise.html

3. Is your Enterprize ready for Microblogging tools like twitter

http://mashable.com/2008/09/30/enterprise-microblogging/

4. What is enterprise 2.0

www.e2conf.com/about/what-is-enterprise2.0.php

5. Enterprise 2.0= knowledge 2.0

http://www.slideshare.net/dan.keldsen/enterprise-20-knowledge-management-20

6. About google wave

www.wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

7. www.wave.google.com

8. Google Wave : a complete Guide

mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide