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3/17/2010

Exploring the Impact of Social Networking in the Enterprise
No one can deny the growth of social networking in our society.  The social media bug has bitten almost everyone and, to match this demand, Microsoft has been offering our customers technologies to harness the power of social networking.  Bringing the power of social media right to the workplace is the goal of new experiences such as the Outlook Social Connector, the enhanced blog, wiki, profile, and user ratings planned for SharePoint 2010, or partner microblogging capabilities built on our platform, like NewsGator’s Social Sites for SharePoint.

But what does the future look like? How do we harness this phenomenon in a way that better informs our product development to benefit our customers’ future needs? Office Labs has been researching social networking and the potential for it to positively impact business productivity for quite some time.  The last project we mentioned publicly was TownSquare (elements of which are now in SharePoint 2010). Of course not every experiment works – most of those never make it out of our internal testing.

Enter our latest experiment: OfficeTalk. This concept test applies the base capabilities of microblogging to a business environment, enabling employees to post their thoughts, activities, and potentially valuable information to anyone who might be interested.  Like any good researcher, we have tested this concept on ourselves first and insights surfaced quickly.  In fact, it was one of the most popular internal concept tests to date. Not only was the obvious demonstrated, that people don’t limit microblogging activity to the purely social, but that even an IT managed implementation focused on business productivity can spread quickly across informal networks and create unique collaboration efficiencies and experiences.

It is important to note, like other projects we’ve released from Office Labs, OfficeTalk isn't a product – it’s a research project focused on learning how people might use social networking tools at work and in what ways both people and organizations realize their value.  That’s part of our mission at Office Labs, to try new ideas on a small scale to learn about how people embrace them, then extend the concepts based on the data and findings we collect.  That’s partly why OfficeTalk today is pretty bare bones – the interesting stuff comes as we learn.

We've learned a lot about what works with social software within Microsoft, but each organization is different, so next we’ll be taking the OfficeTalk concept test, along with other social networking experiments, to a few customers to learn how different businesses and people adopt and use these technologies.  Ideally we will learn enough to not only better understand how to apply existing social networking technology at work, but also identify trends and gaps for the next generation of experiences.

If you are interested in our research and might consider having your firm participate in this concept test, let us know. Since this is a research project, only a very small number of pilots will be considered, but we’d still love to hear from you!

UPDATE: The OfficeTalk private pilot is no longer accepting nominations.
Posted at 11:54 AM by Ashok (Office Labs) | Category: Office Labs; OfficeTalk | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (8)

Comments

Just in Time Knowledge Management

This is an excellent initiative. Even if it is not intended to be a product, the research aspect is invaluable.

Micro-blogging enables a group of people, who are informally bound together (weakly tied), to share expertise and create value.

Here are some specific question that the research may help answer:

1) Did micro-blogging help in building "virtual" teams across vertical (management and individual contributors) and horizontal levels?

2) Did the collaboration across silos improved as a result of micro-blogging?

3) Did it in help in finding expert in other organizations?

4) Did others find the expertise your shared in your stream helpful?

5) What about relationship building? Did you convert weak-ties to strong-ties?

6) Did folks become less-reliant on their management to establish communication channels with other groups?

7) And most importantly, how was trust among employees impacted after few months of usage?

Perhaps your research so far can answer these. I would like to hear your thoughts.

Saqib

Saqib Ali at 3/19/2010 3:26 PM

About JIT

It's not easy to beat Twitter
Rijan Mulder at 3/22/2010 7:53 AM

Re: Twitter

Rijan,

OfficeTalk is a more geared towards enterprise micro-blogging needs, whereas Twitter is for everything else......

Saqib

Saqib Ali at 3/22/2010 8:59 AM

No, this is what is needed

My firm of +350 strong is mainly a proprietary financial trading firm ( think private hedgefund) with other outside interests that deals with massive amounts of data at high speeds. We are an MS shop. Like most organizations we have trouble communicating in groups let alone across the entire firm.  Email is a pre web1.0 solution that gets ugly with its cc's and frwd's. Instant messaging is too linear and point to point-- way too siloed for our purposes. Chat rooms become too noisy. We have been desperately looking for a microblogging solution. Because our core business is in a regulated industry, we need an enterprise solution that resides on our servers. The cloud is not an option. That eliminates many of these services.  The stakeholders do not trust open source solutions. Many of these services we have test drove had too many bells and whistles. Some where not intuitive enough.  We have tried Sharepoint and found it cluncky and seemed more 1999 than 2010.  There are many things we liked in the products we have tried just haven't found 'that fit'  I think we are soo in the wheelhouse of alpha testers for this project for a firm our size and the type of cross company communication we seek. I hope we get a shot at this product!
gds711 at 3/23/2010 6:25 AM

Micro-blogs, events and aggregation

At our company I am driving an effort to move information away from email towards improved communications mediums like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, etc.  As we started looking at this it became clear that the "holy grail" of improved communication focused on events and feeds.  Meaning, everything in your company (projects, people, applications, etc) produces events.  If those events have a taxonomy around them then they can be classified and organized, giving consumers of those events a very powerful tool to aggregate only the information that impacts them, while filtering out everything else.  Now if those events are real-time - it gives you the ability to create a "facebook wall"-like environment where the data, instead of being social in nature, is enterprise information.

A key to seeing this through to reality is the ability for employees to use micro-blogs to convey their own events and project managers to use them for communicating project events (milestones completed, decisions made, roadblocks encountered, etc).  Sure, customized lists in SharePoint work just as well for this, but this functionality is really suited well for micro-blogs.  We are investing heavily in SharePoint right now, but this is an area where even SP 2010 falls short.  I'd love to see micro-blogs and improved event aggregation in the next version of SharePoint.
iLatta at 3/23/2010 3:44 PM

Re: Micro-blogs, events and aggregation

@iLatta:

You bring up an interesting point. Integration of the feed from other apps into the micro-blogging activity stream is the key, whether it be through direct API calls or RSS. For e.g. if I update a enterprise wiki page, it should automatically create a micro-blog entry on my stream stating that I updated such and such wiki page. Similarly for other apps as well.

Saqib

Saqib Ali at 3/23/2010 6:41 PM

Re: No, this is what is needed

Saqib Ali at 3/23/2010 6:54 PM

Interesting development...

Owning the data on your own servers will be a USP for every interested prospect. This is a big advantage compared to other services. What if they go bankrupt and you have no longer access to their servers and data?
sailingbert at 3/29/2010 6:38 AM
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