Enterprise Social Networking

Enterprise Social Networks are identifiable by the fact that they integrate with existing platforms and applications and they appeal directly to end users. In effect, they bring the benefits of social media to the enterprise. So how would you recognize an Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) product? It would be something like Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software’s Jive, Salesforce’s Chatter, and IBM’s Connections. In fact, those are Gartner’s four leading products in the sector (Gartner Inc “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace” by Nikos Drakos et al, September 2013).

Drakos and colleagues estimated the market will be worth $1.4 billion in revenue by 2016, and described it as “dynamic and highly competitive”. Gartner looked at the top 20 vendors in the sector. Apart from the top four mentioned above, Gartner’s Visionaries were: Google, Telligent (Zimbra), SAP, Cisco, and Acquia. The Niche players were: OpenText, Huddle, blueKiwi, Igloo, Novell, Liferay, and Zyncro. And the Challengers were: Tibco Software, VMware, NewsGator, and Atlassian.

According to Gartner, “Leaders are well-established vendors with widely used social software and collaboration offerings. They have established their leadership through early recognition of users’ needs, continuous innovation, overall market presence, and success in delivering user-friendly and solution-focused suites with broad capabilities”.

If you’re thinking of getting an Enterprise Social Network, what are you going to use it for? “S.O.C.I.A.L. – Emergent Enterprise Social Networking Use Cases: A Multi Case Study Comparison”, by Kai Riemer and Alexander Richter (2012), analysed nearly 7500 messages from across five mature networks and found that virtually all the messages could be grouped into one of eleven generic categories. They were:

• Problem solving – what can I do with x that I can’t do with y?
• Idea generation – how we can make this group more useful to its members?
• Status updates – I’m in my weekly meeting with customers
• Work coordination – @bob Can you raise tom’s permissions
• Information storage – checklist for H&S
• Discussion and opinions
• Input generation – #NHF recommends
• Meeting organization – I can’t make that time, can we shift to 4pm?
• Event notifications – 19 May for leaving drinks.
• Social praise – thanks for all your hard work on cut-over day.
• Informal talk – congratulations on your new baby.

Gartner has suggested that the business objectives of Enterprise Social Networking projects are to:

• Improve general communication and information sharing
• Boost team productivity and effectiveness with projects and business processes
• Support communities that stimulate learning and innovation, diffuse best practices, and encourage peer-to-peer networking that strengthens professional and interpersonal relationships.

So let’s take a brief look at those market leaders.

Yammer was launched in 2008 and was bought by Microsoft in 2012. The plans seem to be that it will tightly integrate with Office, SharePoint, and application programs running on Windows. Yammer lives in the cloud and looks pretty much like Facebook, so users can find their way round it fairly easily. With Office 365, sites can run their Microsoft infrastructure in the cloud too.

Jive Software’s Jive was previously known as Clearspace, then Jive SBS, then Jive Engage. Jive (the company) was founded in 2001. Salesforce.com was founded in 1999, and provides a variety of different services to its customer base. Both offer a Facebook-like product.

IBM’s product is IBM Connections. It was announced at Lotusphere in 2007, and is currently at Version 4.5. Its components include a homepage, microblogging, profiles, communities, ideation (the ability to crowdsource ideas), media gallery, blogs, bookmarks, activities (a tool for groups of people to work together on a specific project or task), files, wikis, forums, and a search facility.

The ten IBM Connections components are J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications that are hosted on IBM WebSphere Application Server. In this way, the components can be hosted independently of each other, and large-scale deployments can be supported.

Importantly, if this is going to get any take up outside of IBM-controlled environments, IBM Connections uses plug-ins to integrate into existing applications, including:

• IBM Notes
• IBM Sametime
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Windows Explorer
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• RIM BlackBerry
• Apple iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch
• Google Android Phones
• WebSphere Portal.

There’s also platform support for IBM WebSphere Application Server V8 and DB2 10, as well as support for the IBM i operating system.

It’s likely that once people start to use them, Enterprise Social Networks will take on a life of their own and new uses will be found for them. My feeling is that their use will continue to grow and you’ll begin to find them embedded in every organization that you visit – and you’ll find people checking them on their smartphones and tablets when they’re out and about.

Tell me about this Yammer thing

I’ve been to a few companies recently that have been using Yammer as a business tool. If you’ve got offices that are spread out, or if your workforce aren’t usually in the office, then it provides an easy way for people to be able to share things – like comments, documents, or images. And you can form groups so discussions, that are only relevant to a small group of people, stay within that small group or team.

Yammer started life in 2008 and was bought by Microsoft in 2012. It’s described as an enterprise social network. That means it’s not a public social network like Facebook, it’s for internal communication between members of an organization or group.

It’s free, it’s very easy to use (if you’ve ever used Facebook), and it provides a private and secure place for discussion. The simplest way to use Yammer is from your browser (Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc), and you can download the app for your smartphone or tablet.

It’s easy to set up and use, but I thought I’d put together some instructions for new users, so they know how to get on and start using it.

To sign up, go to www.yammer.com. You’ll see a large box in the middle of the page:
 

Type in your company e-mail address – you can’t use your personal e-mail address because it won’t work.

Complete your Yammer profile and add a photo. New people in your organization may not be familiar with who you are and your particular skill set.

You can join groups and follow topics that are relevant to you. If Yammer gets very busy with people posting, you won’t want to be informed every time there’s a new post. So, click on the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. In the drop-down menu, select ‘Edit Profile’. Then select ‘Notifications’ from the list on the left, and then choose how often you want to receive notifications. ‘Save’ your choice. There’s a ‘Back Home’ box top-left to get back.

You can also follow other people – that way you get to see what they’re posting.

When you come to use Yammer on subsequent occasions, you simply click on ‘Log In’ on the right of the top menu bar.

Now you can start to use Yammer.

You can post messages – these can be comments, questions, updates. You can post links to articles or blogs elsewhere on the Web.

You can follow people, which means that you want to view messages from them in ‘My Feed’. It’s not like a friend request. They don’t have to agree. They don’t have to follow you back.

You can read what other people are posting and get a feel of what’s going on across the organization.

You can ‘Like’ other people’s posts.

You can find out more about people in your organization by reading their profile.

You could start your own group or join existing groups.

You can upload pictures. You can organize events/meetings. You can survey what people think about things

You can use topics so that all the posts are around a specific topic. To add a topic to a post, click ‘add topic’ while writing the message or you can use a hashtag. You can also add topics to a published message by clicking ‘more’. Hashtags (#) are used to identify what posts are about and to make finding information easier.

You can search for information in the search box near the top of the page. This will find whether anyone else has posted about a particular topic.

And you can send a direct message in three ways. Use the @ sign followed by the user’s names. As you start to type the name, a drop-down menu will give you suggestions. You can send a private message:

• Click ‘Inbox’ in the left column.
• Click ‘Create Message’ on the right sidebar.
• Select ‘Send Private Message’.
• In the ‘Add Participants’ field, start to type the person’s user name. A drop-down list of matching user names appears.
• Select the name of the name of the person you want to send the message to.
• Write your message, and then ‘Send’.

And you can send a message through ‘Online Now’:

• Click ‘Online Now’ in the bottom-right corner.
• Start writing the person’s name. A drop-down list of matching user names appears.
• Use the up and down arrows, and ‘Enter’ to select a name. A message box opens.
• Write your message, and then ‘Send’.

Recipients are notified that they have a message.

Unbelievably, Yammer refers to all communications inside Yammer as “Yams”. Yams are sorted into various feeds. A feed, if you’re new to social media, is a way of keeping you up-to-date with content that other people are posting.

I think many organizations would benefit from an internal social media tool. There are alternatives to Yammer available, but I think it can be very useful within an organization to help with communication. And it can be fun!

Lync and Yammer

Over the past couple of years I’ve been working with SharePoint at various sites, and more recently with Lync and Yammer. Now these are two products that mainframers may not be that familiar with and I thought people might be interested to know more.

Microsoft Lync was called Microsoft Office Communicator. It’s an Instant Messaging client – like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger – that can be used either with Microsoft Lync Server or Lync Online, which is available with Microsoft Office 365. In fact it is an up-to-date version of Windows Messenger which was used with Microsoft Exchange Server.

As well as running on PCs, Lync 2010 has Windows Phone, Android, and iOS apps. Lync provides instant messaging, Voice Over IP, and video conferencing facilities, and uses Microsoft Outlook contacts stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server. Office can show whether other people are working on the same document, and Lync allows file sharing.

What makes it so useful is those really unimportant e-mails that you don’t need an audit trail for can be replaced by Instant Messaging conversations. That cuts down on the number of e-mails that need to be backed up each evening and eventually stored on the off-chance they’re important. And, of course, you can type or you can talk. And you can set up meetings with people in offices around the country and video conference – assuming your organization has the bandwidth to do so.

Lync and Sharepoint integrate to an extent – they’re both from Microsoft. For example, there’s an “online presence indicator next to an individual’s name wherever their name appears in a site collection in SharePoint”. “Assist in providing colleague suggestions for use in My Sites, My Profiles, and People Search”. And “through Lync, provide access to SharePoint people and skills search including names and skills and a link to the user’s My Site”. Thank you to J D Wade, who’s blog at http://wadingthrough.com/2012/04/04/lync-and-sharepoint-integration-more-than-presence-information/ was the source for these examples.

Yammer is described as an enterprise social network service. It was launched in 2008, but, more importantly, Microsoft bought it last year. Yammer acts like a corporate Facebook service. It allows people to send message to other individuals or to groups. Only people with the same domain name in their e-mail address can access the corporate Yammer network. As well as access from a PC, there’s Android Windows Phone and iPhone apps available.

Chris Wright, in his blog at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/five-yammer-features-that-sharepoint-users-are-going-to-love-020339.php, lists features of Yammer that SharePoint users will like. Chris says “SharePoint has never really had its own ‘messaging’ system, so the Yammer Inbox fills a real gap”. Chris adds: “Yammer polls are a nice quick way to ask a question of people in your community, and will add a lot to the sense of community SharePoint is trying to foster”. Looking ahead, Chris says that documents held in a Yammer feed can be edited in Office web apps. He says: “This is a great example of a few of the features SharePoint is bringing to the table to improve Yammer (rather than the other way round)”.

We know that Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer with SharePoint and Office 365. It appears that Yammer will eventually replace SharePoint’s newsfeed. It seems there’s a plan to share documents with Yammer using SharePoint. And Yammer users will be able to upload and store documents using SkyDrive Pro. A file preview and edit capability with Yammer will work in conjunction with Office Web Apps. There’s even talk about translation capabilities being added to Yammer. Eventually Yammer and Lync (and Exchange) will be integrated.

The integration of Yammer builds on Open Graph – an open API protocol for following objects external to a social network site used by Facebook. IBMers are perhaps more familiar with OpenSocial 2.0 for IBM Connections. Both provide a way for people to follow things.

What makes Yammer and SharePoint integration so interesting is that staff can use a the type of social media they’re familiar with from home in a business situation. If I can see you’re meeting client A tomorrow, I might ask you to check how he thinks project X is going. Or I might even just want to say hello to someone who is an occasional customer. Yammer is a business tool that is fun and easy to use – certainly compared to the more heavyweight Web parts etc of SharePoint.

The fact that Instant Messaging and social media can be included in a business environment shows that these tools are maturing. And, like BYOD, it shows end users are driving the environment they want to experience at work. I wonder how long it will be, with IBM’s pushing of social media tools, before something like this is available to everyone on z/OS.

Social businesses

What is a social business? Wikipedia tells me that a social business was first defined by Prof Muhammad Yunus as a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today. A wider definition includes any business having a social rather than financial objective. Or a social enterprise can be defined as a commercial activity by socially minded organizations. Perhaps a better definition these days is a business that has adopted social networking tools and practices for internal and external functions across their organization.

The IBM Web site tells us that: “Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information. Becoming a leader in your marketplace means using social solutions to transform how business gets done – driving cost savings, increasing revenue, and cultivating competitive advantages.” That definitely sounds like a good thing.

In a report from Altimeter entitled The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, it’s suggested that many social strategies are not linked to business goals, but are instead often driven by a “social for social’s sake” orientation. The report notes that, even when goals are aligned, social initiatives frequently must deal with a lack of defined strategy, governance, or funding. The report suggest six stages a company has to go through to become a social business:

• Planning – understand how customers use social channels and prioritize strategic goals where social can have the most impact.
• Presence – amplify existing marketing efforts and encourage sharing
• Engagement – drive considerations to purchase and provide direct support with internal employee engagement.
• Formalized – set governance for social, create discipline and process, and have strategic business goals.
• Strategic – scale across business units and move into HR, sales, finance, and supply chain.
• Converged – social drives transformation and integrates social philosophy into all aspects of the enterprise.

Becoming a social business is not something that can be left for tomorrow, organizations need to act now. They need to identify what it is they do well, and they need to get the message out there. And that last part comes with two health warnings! You need to be using the same social media as your clients and potential clients. If they don’t use the same media, they won’t see the message. Secondly, keep your eye on new media. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Google plus may not always be kings of the heap. Pinterest is currently very popular. Watch out for trends – so you don’t lose that link with clients and potential clients. Maybe you should be looking at smartphone apps that will make it easy for people to come to you for whatever it is you supply.

Interestingly, there are products like Yammer (www.yammer.com), which Microsoft bought last year, Chatter, and others, that offer private social networks for organizations.

IBM VPs Jeff Schick and Sandy Carter were on stage at IBM Connect 2013 showing off the capabilities in IBM’s social business platform. It seems that companies are combining social technologies, the cloud, mobile, and analytics to create a flexible, intelligent framework for making the most of social connections. In an IBM survey of CEOs, 57% picked social business as a top priority and nearly three quarters (73%) are making significant investments in analysing data.

According to Jeff Schick: “A disconnect between how we live our lives – through digital connections and sharing – and how we work isn’t sustainable. Particularly since the new generation of workers who will fill companies’ ranks don’t know any other way of interacting and working than social media. The rate of productivity, innovation, and employee retention will increasingly depend on who can master this coming age of social business.”

For an organization to just have a social media strategy isn’t enough. The organization must transform itself into a social business to ensure its continued success.