Social Glass

In a previous post I discussed a strategy for rolling out a SLATES-oriented solution to the enterprise. I thought I’d expand on it a bit and discuss a conceptual Enterprise 2.0 architecture.There are a variety of applications that provide functionality of various aspects of the SLATES approach and Social Networking, many of them opensource. Roller, for example, is a great opensource Java-based blogging tool. XWiki is an up and coming opensource Java-based wiki. Java-source.net has a great list of Enterprise2.0-oriented opensource projects including a list of Signals projects. To-date there are no known opensource Tagging or Social Networking applications, and there is no single opensource or commercial application that provides all of the SLATES functionality in one package (although some come close like IBM’s Lotus Connections. By the way I should have a trial copy of it soon). Thus, these applications must be integrated, and this presents a usability problem. Providing a complex web of disparate systems (one for Search, one for Authoring, one for Tags etc.) complicates matters as users have to learn when and how to use each new system. As Dion Hinchliffe argues first and foremost a successful Enterprise 2.0 implementation requires ease of use:

Blogs, wikis, and other Enterprise 2.0 apps have to be the easiest thing to use. Preferably much easier than the tools users have now or they won’t start using them. While many people use the office productivity software they have now because they have no choice, the fact is, they are quite familiar with them and they’re too busy to learn new tools even if they work better.

The user-interfacing side of an Enterprise 2.0 solution should be a single Rich Intranet Application (RIA) that aggregates SLATES services provided by several platforms. In this way SLATES applications can be deployed independently on the backend, and the user is left unaware of this. The RIA must make use of “Web 2.0″ technologies such as AJAX and be intuitive (requiring no training) and consistent. It should stand as one comprehensive online presence. From a user’s perspective the user interface is the Enterprise 2.0 solution, so it must be designed well in order to foster acceptance. Traditional legacy applications often neglect the user interface and fail to live up to their corporate potential due to user rejection. It cannot be over-stressed how important the design of the user interface is. Simplicity and ease-of-use are paramount.

In Figure E2A each area of the SLATES approach is represented as a service (minus Extensions, which could be provided by the Enterprise Search tool). This has several advantages:

1. Flexibility in how the services are deployed - the services can be implemented in a phased approach to ease the business into Enterprise 2.0.
2. Services are exposed to the “Legacy Intranet” using interoperable standards and are available for reuse. Portions of the Enterprise 2.0 solution can be consumed by existing legacy portals, for example. The enterprise can also choose to share these services with business partners across the firewall boundary.

Figure E2A also depicts how the Enterprise Search offering extends beyond the Enterprise 2.0 solution crawling and indexing content from the Legacy intranet. This makes all enterprise content discoverable regardless of where it resides.

Security

Many enterprises have made significant investments in Single Signon (SSO) using directory services such as LDAP or Active Directory. The Social Networking service should make use of enterprise SSO and augment it only to include attributes that are required to catalyse discovery and collaboration. In the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem, the Social Networking service should act as the access and authentication broker authorising content delivery upon each request. In this way the knowledge worker has a seamless experience when logging into his PC in the morning, accessing legacy intranet content he’s found through the Enterprise Search tool or authoring blog posts. The Enterprise Search platform must also respect intranet security policies so knowledge workers can find only that which they’re allowed to view. In the absense of SSO an Enterprise 2.0 system should implement its own role-based security so that content can still be secured accordingly. Access control should also extend to the Enterprise 2.0 Authoring tools as it is sometimes appropriate for this content to be restricted. Organisations should be able to embark on top-secret or commercially sensitive projects but still use the Enterprise 2.0 solution for project-level collaboration. Only users on these sensitive projects would have access to the protected content.