Social Glass

Joe McKendrick over at the FASTForwardBlog had a great post about the generous tolerance levels us users seem to have with SaaS products. In it he compares the high standards we’ve come to expect with “thick-client” software and how those standards are relaxed a bit with the “thin-client”, or client-server, approach . And I quote:

We’re still enamored by the flexibility and simplicity of the Web 2.0 and SaaS models, and I’ll take them any day over the CD packs and installation headaches of old. But it’s time to start holding vendors’ feet to the fire over the quality of these services being delivered, just as we did in the days of old. Whether the code is inside our machines or out in the cloud, we should expect and demand top quality and high performance.

Well said. There’s been discussion before and there will be discussion in the future about this topic, and how the word Beta is a disclaimer for “don’t blame us if it doesn’t work”. SaaS vendors, especially B2B SaaS vendors, need to get this one right. The quality needs to be there for SaaS truly to take hold.

I recently wrote about how Search should be the core of Enterprise 2.0, and I’m encouraged to see the release of several new socially-oriented Enterprise Search tools. The first is a release of ConnectBeam at Honeywell (covered by Andrew McAffee here). The second is an announcement from BEA on its new Web 2.0 product called Pathways, which is covered over at the FASTForwardBlog.

Both of these merge social bookmarking metadata (tags, users) with organic Enterprise Search results. This is a fantastic idea for two reasons:

1. Users can make a better judgement on the value of the document based on social bookmarking metadata (i.e. how many people have bookmarked it).
2. Users are exposed to others who have similar interests to what they’re searching for (i.e. if a document I find useful has been bookmarked by 5 other people, maybe those people have found other documents I might also find useful), and this facilitates collaboration.

Internally we’ve developed a prototype that does something similar. It fuses Google Enterprise Search results with a custom social bookmarking system displaying the folksonomy that has developed for a given document and a link to other users who’ve bookmarked it:

We’ve seen interest in this extension to Enterprise Search from several customers. I’m not at liberty to say who at this point, but in a few month’s time we may see the successful delivery of this system and I may be able to comment on it further.