Avoid Profile Potpourri

Connectbeam is one of those first-movers in the market that often gets overlooked but they continue to do some creative things (see below). While initially identified as a social bookmark system for the enterprise (an "internal delicious"), the company has done a credible job of expanding the conversation beyond a tooling discussion. In a broader context, issues related tagging and bookmarking lead to more business-centric conversations on the benefits from user-led information discovery, filtering and allowing people at a personal and group level to self-organize information. While some activities around tags/bookmarks might be directly related to a work activity, there are community interactions made possible that enable informal information sharing, personal learning and ad-hoc group formation as people connect to one another.

However, (you knew there had to be a "but" coming...) - as I read the post below, it brought up a topic in my mind that strategists should be concerned about and that is the emergence of isolated profile components within a lot of the tools associated with "Enterprise 2.0". Already you can see vendors on the market (blog, wikis, feed syndication platforms, social bookmark systems, etc) all coming out with their own profile component. In parallel - vendors in the unified communications space also have their own versions of rich profiles.

It's understandable - people want to have a richer understanding of their fellow employees and vendors want to differentiate their products from competitors - profiles help meet those needs. Often these profile components are also associated with additional benefits such as expertise location and community-building. There are clearly applications that can be built around profiles but the proliferation of profiles embedded in a proprietary way across multiple products should raise critical questions: (1) how many profile engines does an enterprise need, (2) how will we systematically populate multiple profiles efficiently, (3) how will we persuade workers to create/maintain multiple profiles, (4) how do profiles link to underlying collaboration, content, communication infrastructure and finally, (5) how should organizations align profile subsystems within social networking platforms with their identity management infrastructure.

The three major players right now for social network sites within the enterprise are: IBM (Lotus Connections), Jive (Clearspace), and Microsoft (SharePoint). IBM and Microsoft are also major UC vendors but the profile functions in their UC products are not aligned with profiles in their social computing products. There are of course other vendors that have social networking capabilities - some focus on more vertical applications while others have more of a suite or take on an overlay approach. But none really have the completeness of what I would consider needed for a Tier 1 player right now. (Note: I would expect Oracle  and Cisco to more clearly define their respective solutions and profile direction in this area at some point.)

Each of these vendors (IBM, Jive, Microsoft) have profile modules. Yet none have clearly articulated how organizations should view the relationship between its profile engine and identity management strategies within the enterprise. None have really addressed interoperability and federation techniques developers and vendor partners should use across products that all have their own profile component (e.g., perhaps based on hCard). 

So - while the post below from the folks at Connectbeam is interesting and the solution worth a look - I would caution people on the profile feature. I would recommend that when you do your vendor evaluations - carve a section out for profiles and look at the bigger picture. You might avoid some messy integration and user adoption issues down the road. 

The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog: Putting the Social into Microsoft Outlook

Connectbeam Social Profiles Integrated into Microsoft Outlook

Through Spotlight Connect for Outlook, employees' Connectbeam Social Profiles are embedded into every internal email. Here's a screen shot of this integration:

What we've put in this profile is the following:

• Contact information, synchronized with LDAP or Active Directory
• Expertise - as created and managed by each employee
• Projects - as created and managed by each employee
• Recent Activity - content created across different social software apps plus bookmarks
• Employee profile toggling - click another email recipient name, see their profile

The social profile makes it easy to see what colleagues are doing and what they know, all at a glance from the Microsoft Outlook inbox.

The Connectbeam Social Computing Blog: Putting the Social into Microsoft Outlook

Comments

[Alan Lepofsky]

"There are of course other vendors that have social networking capabilities", such as Socialtext People http://www.socialtext.com/products/socialnetworking.php , which integrates People into the fabric of the content creation and information sharing components of Socialtext.

[Bill from Atlassian]

Every app in the enterprise is eventually going to have a user profile...wiki, portal, ERP, HR management system. Employees can really only be expected to keep one user profile updated inside the enterprise, especially when they have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to manage. It's naive to think that organizations are going to have one single enterprise-wide deployment of a social network, especially when departments and business teams are increasingly choosing their own collaboration tools (think Yammer). Look at how many large organizations have more than one LDAP domain. My prediction...you're going to see different teams and departments within the enterprise using their own social networking technology. It will be highly fragmented. There's no reason user profiles are the birthright of IBM, Microsoft or even Jive. It's an uphill battle but Connectbeam has as much a claim on user profiles as anyone else.

[Hutch Carpenter]

Mike - thanks for including Connectbeam in this write-up. I really like your note that we're doing "a credible job of expanding the conversation beyond a tooling discussion." Really, it's about the problems any of these tools solve, not the tool feature set itself. Look at Twitter - minimalist feature set, but very powerful in terms of impact.

Connectbeam's Social Profile was built to accomplish the following:

1. Create a whole view of each employee across their activities

2. Serve as a social networking layer across different enterprise applications

3. Make expertise a helluva a lot easier to find

Bill's comment above is true. We will continue to see the adoption of different applications as many companies select the best of breed for what works for them. And many have built up a lot value in their existing apps, and want to extend that value elsewhere.

Finally, we're pursuing an API strategy that lets enterprises put social activity from anywhere into anywhere they see fit.

[Paul Fisher]

We've been evaluating social networking tools at FDA, including some mentioned in this discussion. They both have profile components, although they're very different in their focus. But what we've discovered is that it's not so much about the tools, but the various sources that really define expertise. There will never (ok, maybe that's a strong word) be a single system that really describes the experience, competency, education and expertise of an individual - that comes from a variety of sources in most organizations. In our organization, expertise can be based on education, articles published, lab work, experience with regulated products, special projects, working group/projec team activities, etc., etc. I've heard loud and clear that an application with self describing profiles and bookmarks/tags is just part of the equation. It also has to have (most likely capture) select information from work being performed in order to build that very effective profile of an individual's expertise/competencies. That could be from a database, a document management system, a collaborative workspace tool, eMail (ugh), etc.