Recently in Internal Category

I recently discovered A Social Life, a most excellent blog that is focused, so far, on enterprise tagging (aka internal tagging / bookmarking...), a subject that is *very* close to my heart right now. Steve Eisner, the blog author is VP of Engineering at AskMe, and has posted a series of insightful thoughts about how tagging might actually work within an enterprise. One of the few times that I've printed out posts and written notes in the margins. Cleaning up the Tag Soup and Our Experiences with Enterprise Tagging Terminology are recommended, but there's good stuff in every post I've read so far. [tags]tags, tagging, enterprise, internal, folksonomy, social[/tags]

Piers Young at monkeymagic...

I'm beginning to get a little weary of the top-down vs bottom-up divide. It's a small point, but isn't the real paydirt what you might call the side-to-side?

My italics and bold..but what an important point. There is a lot of focus on point-source blogs - where often a single blog is used as a communication channel, allowing, for example, a CEO to "connect" with employees, and to get some real and direct feedback.

Yeah - that's interesting, and for some companies it's even a breakthrough - and I'm speaking from my own consulting experience here with some recent work. But, and here's the point that needs to be emphasized - the CEO blog should be the thin end of the wedge, not the end-goal. Getting senior members of the company blogging should result in more understanding and adoption of blogging, with the aim of creating an internal blogosphere. Why is that good ? Because that's when you start to reap the benefits of being able to aggregate, tag, subscribe, connect, datamine, and share all that information (sometimes known as knowledge) - and not in a formally mandated ("here's your KM template form to fill in to share knowledge") way.

[tags]internal, blogs, CEO, blogging, enterprise[/tags]

Bill Ives is writing an article on enterprise social bookmarking (del.icio.us inside the enterprise / behind the firewall), and points to an interesting paper in the ACM Queue by the IBM dogear team. A reminder that I'm storing a list of (available) tools for an internal use here. [tags]internal, social, bookmarks, dogear, tags[/tags]

In a post talking about innovation toolsets, Ton Zijlstra mentions why many companies have problems innovating

I generally belief that organizations lacking innovative potential isn't due to the number of ideas they get. Usually their ability, or rather inability, to bring ideas to action, to package them in such a way that they can move easily through existing business processes or structures, or to see when new structures are needed and how to build them, is what keeps them back.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and is yet another reason to introduce ground-up social tools such as blogs, wikis and other services to allow the kinds of short-term networks and collaboration structures to emerge as necessary without a big expensive process that just makes it too costly to easily take risks. [tags]social, internal, emergent, blogs, wikis, enterprise, innovation, collaboration[/tags] (PS, as you can probably see, I'm loving the SimpleTags plugin for wordpress)

Panel about the do's and don'ts of corporate blogging. Struan Robertson - tech lawyer at Pinsett Masons. "Lawyers can give you plenty of reasons why this is a bad idea - here are some of them

• the risk of defamatory material being posted. "best blogs are a little bit edgy"
• negative comments - referenced the mini-microsoft blog "does bill gates or other shareholders want to be reading negative comments - what does it do the share value"
• lots of other stuff

all of which is applicable to almost any kind of communication. Referenced outlaw.com their technology law website - positive impact - demonstrates tech law credibility, makes them seem more approachable, and has generated business. Phillipe Borremans - IBM Blogging internally for 4 years, over 5,000 internal blogs, proactively asking e'ees to blog. Have internal blogging platform - any e'ee can "and should" blog. Blogs, wikis, podcasts are treated as a set of tools that co-exist with other tools (like Notes teamroom). Guidlines are important - talks about the process for creating the IBM blog guidelines. Bloggers wrote the guidelines - these guidelines were posted on a wiki and comments/changes invited. Then handed over to legal. "If you don't have guidelines, don't blog." Don't impose the guidelines - they should be created by the blogging community and then given to lawyers". Blogging depends on a culture of openness. Need to educate, it's not as easy as it is perceived to be - especially internally. Genie Lutz -Partner @ PWC PWC started blogging internally 18 months ago, and 8 months ago externally. 16,000 e'ees in UK - 10% per annum e'ee turnover. Have a number of external blogs. "We sell intellectual property" - the purpose ofthe blogs is to personalise the information. Surprised about the level of readership they've got, and the level of commentary the external market is providing - real sense of dialogue with the market. They are a regulated business - which constrains what they can do/say. Terms and Conditions on everything - FSA have guidelines on what can be said on websites. Philippe Borremans sums it up - "It's about trusting your people and showing common sense..." Technorati Tags: blogging4business

We're all loving the increasingly rich set of tools and services that exist for the (external) blogosphere. But, as many companies start to allow employees to blog internally, there is a need (and an expectation) that equivalent tools will be available - after all, much of the power and utility in blogging comes from having these extra pieces of functionality available.

Unfortunately, either much of this is not in place, or it's all being kept very quiet. So, I'm going to keep track of internal equivalents to external tools and services in this post. Please leave a comment or email me and I'll update this post. Vendors - please feel free to email me or add a comment - I'm very interested in getting quick (less than 1 hour) and focused demos. Here's my starter list:

Internal only

• blogging server software
  • Movable Type, Wordpress, Drupal etc
• Enterprise RSS platforms
  • Newsgator Enterprise
  • Attensa - [Need to schedule a demo]
  • KnowNow Enterprise Syndication Solution - [Need to schedule a demo]
• social bookmarks / tagging [eg del.icio.us]
  • del.irio.us - perl based, very similar to del.icio.us
  • scuttle - PHP based - looks nice
  • dogear - IBM pilot social bookmark service - not available outside IBM yet.
• technorati equivalent
• None
• Wikis
• Too many to list, but some that I've tried are:
• instiki
• twiki
• mediawiki
• a good list of wikis is here
• confluence [used internally by the BBC, and by us at Headshift]
• Integrated platforms
• Community Server:
• blogs, web based rss aggregator, internal blog aggregation, forums. I've been playing around with this a little, and it looks very useful.
• There's a free and only slightly limited version available that would work well for small companies as well as workgroups or departments.
• Paid for options exist, giving access to single sign on, Exchange Server connectors, load balancing, etc.
• ASP.net based, source code included.
• Elgg
• Intended for the education community, this nonetheless looks like a powerful integrated platform - blogs, tags, social networks, feeds. I'll be trying this out as well - there's a showcase site at elgg.net
• ThoughtFarmer - 'social software for intranets'. Wiki based solution that seems to cover off some of the required functionality of an intranet. Includes some social bookmarking and social discovery features.
• Lotus Connections - IBM's recently announced move into the enterprise social space. Apparently integrates social bookmarking (dogear), blogs, social discovery and communities (forums ??). [
• Intel SuiteTwo - I hesitate to add SuiteTwo into this category, as it's really a bunch of other products (Movable Type, SocialText, Newsgator, SimpleFeed) bundled together with some integration services from SpikeSource. Hard to see where the value is here.
• QEnterprise - don't know much about this - need to get a demo or more info.
  

Externally hosted that can work internally

• Integrated Platforms
• ThingsPrime - a 'generic Web 2.0 application server'. Don't know much about this, but Tom Routen from Thingsprime contacted me asking to be added. I've scheduled a demo, so will see what it's all about.
• blogtronix corporate - integrated blogging, wiki, social networking platform [need to schedule a demo]
• Blogging Client
• ecto, blogjet, performancing for firefox, Windows LiveWriter
  
• Aggregators
• feeddemon, newsnetwire, newsgator outlook edition, attensa
• Wikis
• socialtext, Confluence Hosted
  
• Blogging Platforms
• typepad, wordpress, blogger,
• iUpload - have an enterprise blogging platform [need to schedule a demo]
• Social bookmarking
• del.icio.us, furl
• ConnectBeam - 'Enterprise Social Bookmarking'. A platform for social bookmarking and tagging that can be used as an externally hosted service, but also can be deployed internally as an appliance. Also bolts on social discovery/expertise location.
• Collaborative news / music
• digg.com, last.fm

What else should be on this list - let me know.

Updates:

After Euan's comment, I thought it might be useful to add a list of hosted services that can be used internally, but don't afford a full internal experience (which some might say isn't a bad thing !). I guess my defining tests for being a true internal service are whether or not an internal RSS feed can be accessed, and where the "install" occurs - on a single server or on multiple clients (bit of a gray area I realise, with services such as last.fm)

• 29th March 2006 - added Cogenz at Niall Cook's suggestion
• 4th April - added Blogtronix
• 23rd April - added Community Server
• 17th May - added elgg
• 30th June - added ConnectBeam
• 13th August - moved Cogenz down to list of external tools that work internally
• 29th November - added ThingsPrime.
• 27th January 2007 - updated ConnectBeam, added Lotus Connections, Attensa, KnowNow ESS, Intel SuiteTwo.
• 5th Feb  - added in iUpload, and moved blogtronix to the internal platform category
• 18th Feb 2008 - some minor changes - mainly for formatting
• 10th April 2008 - added QEnterprise