Social Glass

Avenue A Razorfish was one of the first companies credited with attempting Enterprise 2.0. They based their solution on mediawiki and made modifications to the codebase for Wordpress and Active Directory integration (AD integration is a great way to avoid the hassle of registering users manually). They also encouraged their employees to use a certain tag on delicious when bookmarking links. The solution then automatically presented newly bookmarked items on the home page by invoking a delicious API to retrieve all bookmarks tagged with that tag.

Avenue A Razorfish is now evolving their wiki to include more features. I’d like to direct you to their blog post which contains an embedded slideshare presentation that explains their approach. They’ve definitely got some great ideas.

We’ve been doing some work within my group to build an E2.0 (or at least a partial E2.0) collaboration system. Initially we’ve concentrated on using open source technologies for budgetary and other reasons. The solution is currently very wiki based although we’re starting to make use of Enterprise Search and Social Bookmarking.

But in doing my research on open source options, it strikes me as odd that no one has created an open source E2.0 application that integrates Mediawiki (wiki), Wordpress (blogging), bbPress (discussion), elgg (social networking) and scuttle (social bookmarking). All of these are PHP-based and open source, so integrating them would seem like an obvious thing to do.

I know that Avenue-A-Razorfish has tweaked Mediawiki to integrate more E2.0 features, but it doesn’t seem that they’ve released the fruits of their effort to the public.

The technical challenge to overcome with integration of disparate applications would be:

• Single Sign-on: Users login once and are then logged in to each application
• Integrated Tags: Each application has its own concept of tag. Tags need to be shared.
• Look and Feel: Styles and themes need to be the same across the suite to give the appearance of cohesiveness.
• I’m sure there are more…

Spikesource did something similar with Suite Two which is worth checking out if you haven’t already.
Maybe I’ll rise to the challenge, brush up on my PHP programming skills, and give it a shot.

I recently wrote that I’m evaluating Enterprise 2.0 tools for internal use. Through my search I’ve noticed that most providers license their software. Few, like SocialText, offer opensource versions (but good luck installing SocialText Open!). I find it interesting given the popularity of opensource and the association many make with it and Enterprise 2.0 that there are so few opensource options. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

I then started to wonder if the recent discontinuation of free Skypeout calls in North America (which was replaced by an unlimited plan) was perhaps a precursor to trends we might see happen in the opensource space. Is opensource just a fad? Are opensource software providers going to disappear and be replaced by low-cost software companies? Time will tell but there are signs that are not so optimistic, like “wikipedia’s funding woes“, for example.