Unified Communications and Social Networking: at first sight, it’s an odd combination. Odd because of the functionality overlap and also because it’s hard to see IT departments having anything to do with popular sites such as Facebook and MySpace. UC was designed for the enterprise environment, and social networking is a consumer development. One set of software operates via the intranet so it’s secure, the other runs on the Internet so it isn’t.
But the really significant difference is the uptake. UC is widely discussed and marketed, but deployment has been slow. Social networking, on the other hand, has been a runaway success. A Google search indicates that there are more than 53 million active users of Facebook, around 250,000 new users join every day and over 30% work as professionals, salespeople, executives, educators or are in technical careers. And of course there are many more sites, both international and national.
The baseline functionality of UC and social networking software is similar: IM and presence, click to call, Webcam, file transfer and the ability to group friends and colleagues. UC can do more, e.g., it works with an address book, but if it hasn’t been implemented in the workplace, then the younger end of the workforce is going to employ the alternative, whether IT like it or not. Recall that IT didn’t welcome PCs, wireless access points or IM. These were developed for consumers and entered the enterprise via the back door. Moreover, the consumer market is increasingly driving technology innovation: it’s much larger, so the rewards are much greater. Enterprises therefore have to accept the fact that the old top-down, centralized approach cannot compete with the new decentralized, Web-centric model.
Maybe you can put the 4-year delay down to the need for Mobile UC and/or Microsoft’s wish to drop the need for third-party support and deliver the whole enchilada. And maybe IT departments are not keen on being locked into desktop communications as well as desktop computing. Your guess is as good as mine. The key point is the failure to deliver the requisite functionality to corporate desktops, which means that OCS runs the risk of being overtaken by events.
Look at the time it’s taken for UC to transition from hype to reality. I started writing about Microsoft’s solution in 2002 when Greenwich, a real-time communications server, was introduced. Later on it became LCS. Client software known as Istanbul appeared in 2004 but that was just an enterprise-class IM product and third-party support was needed to enable the kind of UC solution shown in Figure 1
Figure 1. IPC software and SDKs from Movial enable UC functionality on PCs and mobile devices. Presence status is indicated by the colour bars (green, yellow and orange). Communications media includes chat, sms, mms, voice and video.
ENTERPRISE 2.0
Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School, invented the term Enterprise 2.0, and his definition is “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies or between companies and their partners or customers.” Enterprise 2.0 embraces popular network sites such as Facebook and MySpace as well as social and network modifications to corporate intranets and other software platforms. And in order to be effective, it also involves social and network changes within the enterprise.
Enterprise 2.0 sites allow information to be shared and knowledge to be managed, both in- and outside the organization. This is enabled by tools such as blogs and wikis, social networking and tagging. The benefits are immediate and significant, e.g., these and other tools allow individuals to join team-centric projects, to control the process while they collaborate, and to share information and create networks.
