Social Glass

Ted, probably my favorite website, is hosting an event in Melbourne, Australia (my favorite city) on 17 January, 2009.  Check out the Ted post about this here.  I’m glad to see Australia getting some love.

When Yammer launched its public Beta I jumped on board and setup an account straight away.  I then invited everybody I knew at work to join, and within a few hours we had 30 people create accounts.  It was cool, people in Canada updated their status and people in China responded to them etc.  I even flew from San Diego to Florida, had a layover in Dallas, “yammered” that I was available for 30 minutes from my iPhone app if somebody needed to talk, and received a call from an IT guy with a question.
The diversity of participants was perhaps the coolest factor.

But then it started to die down.  While our company user count is high in Yammer, volume is restricted mostly to a small group of 15 people, all of whom work in the same division.  Maybe it’s a coincidence that we work on the Consumer Media side of the house, and that the others who initially signed up are less social media savvy.  But I think we’ve drowned the other guys out.  The 15 remaining people use Yammer to:

• Share links to Proof of Concepts or blog posts
• Broadcast when servers are being rebooted
• Declare deadlines for code deployments
• Indicate when a service is down or unresponsive
• Let others know they’ll be out of the office for an hour

But what I’m really interested in is what’s happening elsewhere in my company.  What new service is the enterprise services group releasing into Beta?  What new ad campaigns is the marketing group launching?  Does anybody want to start a Ruby on Rails is not scalable debate?

My conclusion: Yammer is great for my team, but the signal to noise ratio flushes the rest of the organization out as others don’t seem to care about what’s important to my group.

My former employer, BearingPoint, has recently launched newthinking.bearingpoint.com, a WordPress-powered blog seemingly open to all employees. This is a bold move as consulting companies typically guard their intellectual property with an iron first. But BearingPoint has been a leader when it comes to transparency. MIKE2, BearingPoint’s information management methodology, launched in 2005 and is “open source”, meaning it’s free for all to consume and contribute to, even competitors. The value to doing this is that BearingPoint capitalizes on the IM market taking business from rivals who would otherwise charge for the information that is free on MIKE2. And, while open, IM methodologies are complex to implement, and clients will be quick to select BearingPoint as their implementation vendor.Kudos to Nate and Jay, who must have played a huge role in getting thiew new blog rolled out. And check out this post from my buddy Sean (who’s getting married next month). Sean is an up and coming Enterprise 2.0 star at BearingPoint. I’m glad to see the new school is starting to have an impact on an otherwise traditional organization.

Update:  It looks like Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint, is the man responsible for newthinking.bearingpoint.com.

Veodia was just announced as the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 launchpad at the E2.0 unconference in Boston today. This makes me happy. I walked away from my trip to china with a renewed sense of how valuable social connections are between teams and started trialling Veodia last week. Video is a great way to enhance the bond between remote teams and helps build a more cohesive, single team unit.

Veodia allows me, as a Manager, to record standup meetings and whiteboard sessions and embed them on our internal wiki much as you would a Youtube video. It also allows me to create a “live meeting”, where I provide a URL to my team in China and they can see me as I talk (I suppose Skype does a good job at this too). And the beauty is Veodia is free for up to 500 MB of video storage. That’s perfect for me as I convince others within my organization of the value add.

What I don’t yet understand, and what’s keeping me from being more aggressive about rolling this out to the rest of my division, is the security model. It seems that there is “security through obscurity”, where cryptic hyperlinks are the only thing preventing a would-be snooper from viewing my content. This is unsatisfactory within an enterprise setting where confidential data is being stored and shared among internal teams. If Veodia can get their security model right they’ll kick some butt.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to Sam Lawrence about Clearspace 2.0, Jive Software’s next incarnation of Clearspace. A lot has been written about this new release today, and it’s generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere (Jive’s annoucement appeared in Techmeme for a while yesterday, which is mostly unheard of for Enterprise 2.0 applications). Sam gave me an overview of the major new features:

• Project home pages can be “iGoogle-ized“. Users can personalize their home pages with drag and drop widgets.
• Cloud Participation: businesses can open up content to be shared with external business partners. Jive hosts the “cloud” where this content is uploaded and shared. The business can then draw its content back in once it’s done collaborating. In 2.0 only individual content items (documents) can be shared in this way. In future releases, entire workspaces can be shared in the cloud.
• Enhanced Reporting: Business departments can get metrics on who’s participating and who’s connecting. Good way to measure ROI, and this is key for management adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
• Social Graphs: The informal and formal networks are modeled in the Clearspace application. Clearspace 2.0 automatically derives formal networks through integration to directory services (i.e. Active Directory), and models informal networks by monitoring how users interact with each other.
• Jotlet Acquisition: Jotlet will enhance the project management features in Clearspace in upcoming releases.

Most importantly, Jive continues its focus on people, something that is lost with other “competitors” like Sharepoint. People are by far an organization’s greatest asset, and Jive’s recognition of this fact will see it emerge as the leader in the social productivity space (if it isn’t already).