June 1st, 2009
Twitter on your intranet: 17 microblogging tools for business
SocialText Signals is part of a broader Enterprise 2.0 suite that provides a robust version of the expected Twitter functionality while working well in context with other SocialText capabilities including their blogs, wikis, desktop, and dashboard products. Significantly, SocialText has support for Active Directory and LDAP and also has connectors for the popular enterprise ECM and communication tools Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Connections. SocialText offers on-premises deployment through a hosted appliance option.
SocialCast is an Internet hosted (meaning it has to run on their servers) microblogging tool for businesses. It has the requisite user profiles, activity streams, and a special feature for asking questions to the broader workplace to explicit tap into corporate collective intelligence. It can keep social messages private just to the company and has one of the better social analytics dashboards available. It’s unclear if SocialCast has support for any corporate identity standards or can interoperate with enterprise portals/ECM, etc.
CubeTree is a newer microblogging offering that offers structured social messages (unlike Twitter Web client, replies form a tree structure which can be more convenient for business activities), different message types such a quizzes, control over notifications to prevent social messaging overload, and like Friendfeed (a consumer microblogging platform that aggregates activity from social activity on other sites), it can integrate activities from a limited but growing variety of other tools such as WebEx and Salesforce.
Yammer is one of the more popular microblogging tools for business at the moment and it got off to a great start when it won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50. Of late, Yammer has been getting increasingly sophisticated from an enterprise perspective and includes policy-based controls, bulk account management, directory integration, and even such governance tools as keyword monitoring to check workers’ compliance with things like social media guidelines. Yammer also has a desktop client as well as an iPhone application and overall is one of the better looking and functioning microblogging tools.
Communote bills itself as a professional microblogging service and is a hosted tool that offers blog and file management features in addition to simple microblogging. It can manage both public as well as private corporate microblogs.
ESME is an intriguing experiment in business microblogging and is an official Apache incubator project, meaning it is open source. The ESME project describes it as a “secure and highly scalable microsharing and micromessaging platform that allows people to discover and meet one another and get controlled access to other sources of information, all in a business process context.” ESME supports OpenID, which can be used for enterprise single-sign on. It also has an Adobe AIR client as well as a Web client. For more details, read Oliver Mark’s excellent write-up of ESME on ZDNet.
Laconica is a free and open source microblogging platform that also runs the infrastructure behind the Identi.ca service. Its two strengths for business microblogging is that it can be easily installed on-premise and it has an open plug-in architecture, so any needed functionality can be theoretically developed or acquired.
IDidWork is an interesting take on microblogging by using the concept of a employee maintaining a work log as the central activity of the service. Managers can then review work logs, workers can see (and prove) how they contributed to the team, and managers can even track their management time and use the service to guide those that they manage. IDidWork is a hosted service and like many of the hosted services in this list, it focuses on core functionality more than the requirements of enterprise infrastructure.
OraTweet, contrary to the name and associated branding, is not actually an official Oracle product but it has many of the enterprise features you’d come to expect from a large software firm. A freely downloadable application, OraTweet supports Single Sign-On, groups, and integration into unified communications as well as associated APEX functionality, with which it was developed.
Present.ly is another leading business microblogging contender that has a good set of business communication features. In particular, Present.ly offers both ad hoc and structured groups, a question answering system based on previously gathering collective intelligence, a Twitter compatible API, and mobile clients. Present.ly currently emphasizes off-premises hosting but will entertain case-by-case on-site installations.
HeadMix is a slightly different take on the concept of social business software and microblogging in particular. Used by large firms such as Best Buy, HeadMix specializes in messaging in between employees using their existing communication flows such as Outlook.
WordPress’s Prologue 2 is not a microblogging product per se. Instead, it recreates much of the model for microblogging on the famous and well-regarded WordPress blogging platform. WordPress itself is a very competent enterprise blogging tool with rich features designed specifically for sophisticated blogging communities and with over 5,000 plug-ins currently available. While itself one of the less capable microblogging tools, P2 is surely one of the easiest to enable if you are already using WordPress today.
OpenMicroBlogger is an open source and free microblogging application that is especially design for intranets/extranets. Feature rich OpenMicroBlogger offers a robust security model that can support groups, rooms, and multi-level access, cross-broadcasting to other services such as Twitter and Identi.ca, an open app store, and more. It offers OpenID support for identity and can be hosted behind the firewall.
Lotus Sametime Advanced is on this list even though it’s not technically a microblogging tool but a powerful, enterprise-class social collaboration and unified communication platform. Not only does it have extensive enterprise features including Single Sign-On, portal support, integration with SharePoint, the advanced version of SameTime also includes persistent group chat, which is very similar to microblogging and has support for groups and other multi-channel features. Because most microblogging features are consumer apps with some enterprise capabilities added, SameTime comes from the opposite side; bringing IBM’s famously capable business-savvy on top of the capability that many will find hard to distinguish from true microblogging. For many IBM shops, this will be a viable potential solution, at least until Connections 3.5 is out, which is supposed to have formal microblogging support.
Co-op is a hosted service designed for co-workers that want to integrate social messaging into their work activities. Containing a time tracker and agenda, Co-op is a unique form of business microblogging that takes a serious view of collaboration via microblogging in a business context.
Yonkly is primarily designed for businesses to create a social messaging connection with their customers rather than microblog internally. It has both public and private capability and deep integration with numerous services including Twitter and others.
Quite a few of you might not be expecting to see Microsoft Office SharePoint (MOSS) on this list, but as I covered by my popular Enterprise 2.0 with SharePoint post a couple of months back, it’s the one quasi-2.0 tool that just about every medium to large sized business already has. Does MOSS have microblogging built in? Not exactly. Is it very enterprise friendly and comply with just about every element of enterprise context I cover above? Yes, more than virtually every other tool in this list. So what is it missing then? For one, like just about everything with SharePoint, you have to coax it (customize it and configure it extensively) to do what you need. In this case, you have to configure the microblogging behavior you’re looking for. How? The best description I’ve seen of this is Michael Gannotti’s extensive post on the subject. Unfortunately, like trying to do many Web 2.0 things with SharePoint, it may be ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. But for many shops, it will be the shortest route to meet the the largest set of requirements. Hopefully for Microsoft shops, the company will offer a microblogging service of their own soon.
So that’s the current list of microblogging apps for business. Please be warned that it’s probably not perfect yet and I’ll post any updates and corrections here as needed. But it’s an excellent start for those trying to get a lay of the enterprise social messaging landscape.
Also be sure to read the Ten leading platforms for creating online communities.
Finally, while many organizations are still putting their Enterprise 2.0 plans in place, now is the time to consider integrating microblogging into a next-generation IT strategy. While the tools market for business microblogging is still quite young and it’s far from clear yet which products will dominate, indications are strong (see my year of Enterprise 2.0 post) that social tools will increasingly be the preferred mode of communication for today’s workers. Organizations should be prepared to think through their options and decide if, when, and how microblogging will be represented in their 2.0 plans.
Did I miss any good tools? Have opinions on microblogging and the workplace? Please leave your comments in Talkback below.
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
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| 06/02/09
