A friend of mine says software selection is only 10% of what makes a successful solution. I’ll agree if the software options all have a set of base features you need! I think the point is there is a lot more to a successful implementation than the underlying software platform (and I’m learning more every day).

Having a few years experience trying to implement Social Media tools in a big company I have a few thoughts on what those base features are.  This week I’ve been asked three times about Sharepoint, so I decided to blog my opinion.  I’m not trying to bash Sharepoint, it does Microsoft Office team collaboration quite well. The lists feature is very powerful and underused. You can build simple Intranet sites with it quickly. So, I’ll explore what I think a social platform should be, and note why I think Sharepoint doesn’t have the core features you’ll need.

Social software starts with the individual.  Your sales division isn’t a social entity, but the people in it are.  While an enterprise social software solution should recognize the reality of the organization (but maybe not focused on the corporate hierarchy) its focus must be the individual contributor. The data you capture should use tags, search, and personal networks to bring it all together.  One easy example is bookmarks.  Individuals add bookmarks to the system with a URL, description, and a set of tags.  Ideally, a user should be able to target that bookmark to an interest group, blog, etc.  People in that individual’s network should see the fact the bookmark was added.  Anyone can search by tag or description and find other relevant or recommended bookmarks. It’s more than adding a link to a site. Sharepoint allows you to add a URL to a site, that’s where it ends. Sharepoint doesn’t support tags without an add-on, and then the tags are only applied to certain parts of the site – not to bookmarks.  In Sharepoint the bookmark belongs to a site, and you can’t search all bookmarks, check for commonly used tags, or find trends.  It’s just a link on a page. So can you store bookmarks on Sharepoint? Sure. Is Sharepoint a suitable platform for social bookmarking? Not even close. There are some free add-on tools to let you build in some lists and web parts but is that what you want for an enterprise platform? The core features should be in the product, not a set of after thoughts.

How about Communities or Groups?  This is one place Sharepoint has some rich features.  Unfortunately it fails to weave the content together within a community, or provide a way to surface up content to a global level.  Content in a group should come in the form of blogs, bookmarks, forums, and more. When those things are all tagged you can navigate through the group easily.  Sharepoint doesn’t provide tags, or any easy way to search across many sites (I do hear some people have success with global search of textual content in 3.0).  How about show me all forum entries and bookmarks tagged with “coffee”? Sharepoint doesn’t support tagging or the navigation and search mechanisms for it. Social software systems for the enterprise must feature a great meta-data driven search or they won’t be useful. Features like blogs should be allow authorship from both groups and individuals.

Another core feature is system news or activity where you can see a log of what’s happening in the entire company or your personal network. Just having a colleague or friend list is very useful if you can’t use it to navigate relevant content in the system. In Sharepoint assumes what is relevant is what’s in the site you are viewing. It doesn’t allow you can’t get feeds of what’s new by artifact type, or by your “friend list”. While all system components should feed the activity stream, a user should be able to insert something into the stream with a status update.  This can contain a note or link to offsite material, etc.  Sharepoint has no notion of status updates or an architecture to support features feeding into a single repository the user can view.  if you use FaceBook this is the Home/Newsfeed.

A great platform needs to be accessible.  In the 90’s that meant some type of COM or CORBA interface. Later, middleware interfaces morphed into web services.  Today RESTful interfaces that only require simple HTTP interactions (like Atom/Atompub) allow for mashups and are what people expect.  While Sharepoint does expose a lot of the underlying data via a web services model (I’ve been told it’s extensive) you’ll have to write a lot of REST based wrappers to enable easy interaction.  Using feeds to get data is tough with Sharepoint.  I’ve found you get a basic feed, but the options to get content by age, ranking, etc is non-existent. Even a list’s feed may be useful (could be somewhat static) but Sharepoint seems to treat most feeds like “news” and only give you recent content. Don’t skimp on the API.

I could go on and talk about using crowd sourcing for idea and news and other features.  I’m sure there is an add-on for this or that, and Microsoft has some new tidbit in the latest release.  Do you want to build a social software system on top of a groupware solution? Why? Find a social sofware solution that is evolving with each release, don’t build something on a platform with none of the infrastructure or mentality you need.

Summary & Other features I’d look for:

• Groups of people can do the same things individuals can.  If a person can store bookmarks, or have a blog a group of people should have those features.
• Profiles must be extendible, tag centric, and support personal networks.
• Blogs should allow multiple authors.
• Everything should feed an activity log the user can filter by their network, tags, etc.
• Ratings & commenting should be pervasive features of any artifact.
• Rich notifications scheme that uses feeds and email.
• Don’t overlook crowd sourcing features.
• Pre-Built widgets that can be leveraged with simple JavaScript.

If you are looking for a platform check out Sparta Networks, IBM Lotus Connections, and Jive Software.  I use Lotus Connections and think the 2.5 version fits much of what I want in a platform. Don’t bother flaming me, it’s simply my experience and opinion.  If you don’t like it go find a blog that agrees with your thinking and enjoy it (and have a cup of coffee too).

The United States Government typically brings to mind thoughts of red tape and process for anything and everything. Think up-tight, uniforms, and nobody shares information. Wikis and blogs would be squashed by regulators or the CIA Right? Nope. The government, particularly the Intelligence and Military, is all over social media tools and is a role model in many respects (one example).

We’ve come a long way. Wikis and other trendy collaboration tools popped up many years ago under the desks of IT folks who got tired of boring document management systems and static Intranet portals. Today every corporate leader is being yelled at, “Get a 2.0 Collaboration Strategy!”

Most companies go through an evolution of tools and platforms to get to a consolidated, supported, “everywhere” platform. As the tools evolve so do new policies to deal with this new media. Often younger segments of the workforce expect these tools, more seasoned employees question them.

How about your workplace? Do you have tools to find other employees based on their user profile? Is there a corporate “Encyclopedia” anyone can contribute to? Can you quickly create ad-hoc communities to share information without email lists? Do you have these tools but your corporate culture is holding back their adoption?

Picking a base product for any service offering is a lot like jumping on a train. At the end of the day it’s a leap and if you make it, well, you probably got lucky. I’ve been busy working with the 2.0 version of this product and it seems at every turn I’m having “close but no cigar” moments. I’ve found myself adding patchwork to get some of the capabilities and look I want, often saying, “darn it’s so close!”. From what I’ve seen on this blog, the 2.5 version will add many of the things I’ve been hoping for.

It drives me crazy when systems organize information on a web site by functional views rather than usage scenarios. Can you imagine when you went to Facebook if you had to see “Picture updates” then go to another location for “Status Updates”, and then another for “Profile Updates”? You want to see everything happening, and in Facebook that’s called the “News Feed”. Looks like LC 2.5 will be adding that and we can leave behind the individual widgets on Homepage. Unfortunately it looks like the Community pages are still grouped by system, but we can easily write a widget to work off of a custom aggregate feed.

Communities is picking up a lot of much needed functionality from the screenshots. File sharing, Wiki, smells like Quickr. I’m not sure why the two products haven’t merged yet because they are so complimentary. If the Wiki is the Quickr wiki I really hope there will still be an integration plan for Confluence. Confluence is the leader in this space and many people have huge installations they won’t migrate. A simple way to map a community to a Confluence space + some member management would neatly fit the bill. Now that there is widget support I could create a widget for displaying Confluence content (oh, I have one…)

Not much information on the new forum support in Communities. The current forum isn’t really much better than FB and is too light for serious use. It needs to be top-notch. It needs to have Feed support by community, not topic centric.

Profiles is getting a “wall” which I guess in the corporate world will be called “Buzz”. There is a “status” but I wonder how Twitter-like it will be. Seems more like facebook status than twitter. I feed Twitter into FB and use it to update FB but also use it for conversations in twitterland.

Thanks Luis for the sneak peek, we’ll be waiting for a beta version

“Social Media” is a buzzword. Essentially social media sites are just web applications that allow people to interact by sharing. The sharing may be in many forms (just a few for example):

• Conversations – Forums, Blogs, Twitter
• Web Site Links – Bookmark sites (delicous), News sites (digg, reddit)
• Documents – Wikipedia, WetPaint, Google Docs
• Personal Information – Linked in, Facebook, MySpace
• Pictures – Flickr, Picassa

So choose your words wisely, especially the buzzwords! Another term your leadership and lawyers might find far more palatable is “employee contributed content”. Enterprise Social Media could be called “Collaboration 2.0 – Employee contributed content that drives knowledge management. Just makes you want to puke and go work for a start-up? Dittos.

It’s all okay, just don’t use the “b word”. Don’t understand? Watch the video.

I love the last idea – let’s implement that in every corporate blog across the country!

I can see the pointy-haired boss inviting Dilbert to his office. He asks him to implement “flogging”. Dilbert smiles wondering if it could be true.

Through the front page of these sites, taxonomy, and search people can find your content. These sites also are starting to provide integration with other social media through open APIs like OpenSocial.

So given the option of self-hosting a site or using online services what should a person or organization choose? While there are a lot of variables to consider, I think integrating online services into a hosted community is a great option. Maybe your thought leaders should have a blog on blogger.com and incorporate that into your website with RSS/Atom. That gets your organization a place on the larger internet but still allows the content to be part of your custom website.

I think smaller organizations and communities can greatly benefit from hosting a package that best fits their needs. That might be a wiki, SN Site (PHPzabi, Dolphin, etc) or CMS (like Drupal or Joomla). Using blog feeds, IM presence indicators, and flexible profile options allow for the greatest community customizations while embracing what is already available as a service on the web.

This opinion is subject to change next week