August 19, 2008. From Eweek Magazine.

See the eWeek Midmarket article.

The trouble with ad collaboration software is that there is nothing ad hoc about setting it up.
Whether it involves Microsoft SharePoint or Lotus Notes from IBM, the setting up of the software usually involves lots of time and the skills of a few select people that have mastered the intricacies of the software.

It’s little wonder that end users are increasingly turning to public Web sites such as Facebook or Twitter to create little ad hoc areas for collaboration. Of course, none of these areas are secure and the sites themselves can be home to all sorts of malware. But the promise of enhanced productivity that translates into getting a specific set of tasks down more quickly usually trumps any potential downside to conducting business in a public place on the Web such as the site built on the Ning social network platform.

Fortunately, an increasing number of small-to-medium business customers are discovering social network platforms that afford them more control over the content on the site complete with higher levels of security, version control and auditing capabilities.

For example, when the city of Ottawa decided to create a task force to gather the best ideas on e-government initiatives, the folks that organized the task force turned to a social networking site created and managed by Igloo Software.

According to Rob Collins, a former CIO of Cognos that that served as the chairman of the task force, the committee was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to set up, configure and manage the group’s collaboration applications running on Igloo.

Collins freely admits that as an old-school IT guy he had his pre-conceived notions about just how long it would take to set up the IT infrastructure around the task force. Instead, they discovered that Igloo provided a pretty straight-forward environment that took little time to set up and is now used to share the task force’s work with hundreds of people that participated in developing the group’s recommendations.

None of this activity is likely to be lost on Microsoft or Google, so the odds are good they will be pushing online collaboration software a lot more heavily in the months to come. In the meantime, Igloo reports that it already has over 200,000 registered members working across 1,000 different communities.

And one other side benefit of this activity is that people who participate in this type of social networking activity are not generating electronic mail about the topic on the corporate e-mail system, which means there is less data to be stored and managed.

It’s unclear how deep the adoption of social networks will be for collaboration applications, but it’s pretty clear we’re only just now seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of how social networks will be used going forward in a business context.