Sorting Out What Social Software Products Really DoSorting Out What Social Software Products Really Do

10 Social Acquisitions Signify Bigger Trends

One problem with evaluating enterprise social networking and collaboration products is the market is a mishmash of very different things.

Tony Byrne, founder of The Real Story Group advisory service and an occasional contributor to the BrainYard, provided a tutorial on evaluating and selecting these products Monday as part of one of the pre-conference workshops for Enterprise 2.0 Boston, a UBM TechWeb event. In the process, he also gave a somewhat skeptical assessment of the value of Microsoft's rumored acquisition of Yammer, which seems likely to be announced this week.

The basic vocabulary of social software field can be misleading, he warned. "Many vendors who label themselves the same way actually do very different things." For starters, it's important to understand the distinction between collaboration and social networking within an organization, even though those terms are often used interchangeably, Byrne said.

[ See our special report: Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2012.]

"When we collaborate, we work jointly on an activity, toward a common goal," Byrne said. "When we network, it's really about connecting with others for its own sake – it's about the relationship. Also, this is about humanizing the digital experience. Much of our software, to date, has assumed we were autonomous robots working in a cube." Collaboration and networking can be very complementary – for example, networking often introduces people who will later become collaborators, he said. As one member of the audience put it, the difference between collaboration and networking is the difference between actively working together versus putting yourself in a position to work well with someone in the future.

What workers really want is an environment that allows them to switch smoothly between those two modes of interaction, Byrne said, but most products today are not equally strong in both. For example, Microsoft SharePoint is a strong (although not perfect) collaboration environment but a weak social networking tool. Yammer, in contrast, is almost all about social networking, even though it has expanded its features list, he said. "Yammer is fundamentally a microblogging program that happens to have a few other services."

Byrne recently blogged that Yammer is unlikely to become a tightly integrated extension to SharePoint. Rather, "it will be another product to purchase, and a very different architecture for customers to understand," he wrote.

How Yammer will be introduced into the Microsoft product line depends partly on which division of Microsoft will absorb the product. If Microsoft adds Yammer to the Microsoft Office group that oversees SharePoint, it could signal that Microsoft recognizes that the SharePoint 2013 edition about to go into a limited release for testing will not deliver enough social pizazz to impress the market. Although Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 was supposed to give Microsoft a way to bring software improvements to market at something more like the speed of social networking, but perhaps that, too, is falling short of expectations, Byrne said. However, he wonders whether the "trivial integration" to SharePoint Yammer has delivered is a good sign for organizations that have made a commitment to SharePoint and are looking for a good way to extend it with social functionality.

Yammer and SharePoint are just a couple of the many collaboration products that come from very different roots, yet are trying to converge on common customer requirements. Yammer is a distinct software product, which means getting it working is relatively quick and painless. SharePoint is a platform, subject to great customization but not as quick or easy to implement, particularly for social collaboration.

Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are the three vendors Byrne considers to be taking a true platform approach to collaboration and social software. "With enough time, money, and painkillers, you can get them to do anything," he said, making these good choices for system integrators to deliver custom collaboration environments for their clients. Before you start customizing, however, each starts out with a different strength. SharePoint lends itself to knowledgebase and project collaboration, while IBM Connections is best at supporting employee communities and locating knowledge within the organization – a result of its origin as an internal collaboration tool in IBM's knowledge-centric enterprise. Oracle, meanwhile, has churned through several iterations of its collaboration strategy and is now focusing on providing a social layer on top of existing Oracle products and middleware, Byrne said. The platform vendors tend to have trouble keeping up with the pace of innovation set by the startups in this market, Byrne said. For example, SharePoint is updated on three year release cycle, in sync with Microsoft Office. Many of the software as a service cloud products are updated more like every three months, to the point where those vendors have to be careful not to overwhelm customers with too much change, he said.

"These are cool tools, but frequently immature," Byrne said, adding that industry boosters and the press "tend to give these vendors a pass because what they're doing is so cool and innovative." Buyers must understand that in software, or software as a service, there are always tradeoffs. "The question is not is this an awesome technology, but is it a good fit for you. The faster, looser vendors like Yammer and SocialText are relatively young companies with relatively young technologies. They make mistakes you'd think would be obvious, and they will not always support you as well as you would like," he said.

Jive Software is "the darling of the bunch because it was actually able to IPO," but it has its own challenges, Byrne said. Jive splits its attention between software for managing public communities and enterprise social networking for private communities, he said. The company has also struggled to maintain a common platform it can use for both cloud delivery of its product and sales of traditional enterprise software. Customers are often surprised to find that Jive has a fairly complex product, which may even require some skills like Java programming for customization and configuration.

In general, social software vendors are more focused on creating user-facing features that demo well than they are on administration and other qualities that are important to large organizations. For example, NewsGator Social Sites is popular as an application built on top of SharePoint that adds a richer suite of social features. But where NewsGator falls down is in anticipating the needs of large, international enterprises – for example, by failing to make some elements of its user interface easy to translate and localize for use outside the U.S., Byrne said.

"I have a lot of criticisms of the big vendors, but they're very careful about that sort of thing. When they deliver a product, they will deliver it with local language versions across dozens of languages," he said.

Social software startups are also divided among multiple camps. Jive is a social software suite with tools for blogs, wikis, activity streams, and several other modes of social interaction. Other products like Socialcast, Tibco's Tibbr and Salesforce.com's Chatter are designed to add a layer of social interaction on top of other applications. Yammer is also moving in that direction, Byrne said, although he still considers it more of a specialty microblogging platform – stemming from its introduction as an "enterprise Twitter." Other software in the specialty category includes WordPress, an open source blogging product that many enterprises use in favor of the blogging tools provided in SharePoint or Jive. "WordPress is so good many enterprises will use it on their intranets even though it's not integrated," Byrne said.

When evaluating these products, it's best not to create "checkbox RFPs" that allow vendors check off all the features they provide, Byrne said. Rather, ask how they address those requirements, seeking to tease out details on the differences between platforms. Focusing too much on software features is a mistake, when you really should be trying to identify a match for the specific types of collaboration you want to facilitate. For example, if your top priority was coordinating project teams, that might lead you to choose a different product than if your biggest need was to get knowledge workers at locations around the world networking and collaborating together.

Those who feel like they're running behind at making sense of social software shouldn't feel too bad," Byrne said. "If you look across the marketplace, most organizations, most of the time, are still experimenting. A lot of people who took the lead early on have really, really, really skinned their knees. I would argue these are still early days," he said.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard