You hear about organisations such as BT and the BBC adopting Facebook as the place to hang out and connect. A friend in the BBC told me they were all "addicted" to Facebook. Perhaps she should be told not to use that particular word at her next performance appraisal.
JP Rangaswami, MD of BT Design, is hugely in favour of Facebook because it creates a formality and permanence around conversations which were once the province of the water cooler. He can see what's really going on rather than have to believe what the org chart tells him. He also likes the idea that the infrastructure to run Facebook is external to BT and therefore someone else's problem.
As you know, many other companies are terrified of letting their staff loose on such social networks and actually ban them, despite the fact that many staff are familiar with them and use them elsewhere in their lives.
Software vendors either want to create their own equivalent in order to keep control or they reluctantly allow Facebook into a a sidepanel of their main applications. They probably don't want to give too much functionality away in case it undermines their business model. I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at what Microsoft is up to with its shareholding in Facebook.
But then along comes enterprise content management company Alfresco with the idea that it will not only accept Facebook, it will cheerfully integrate it into the company's repertoire. It allows registered users to publish and share documents and other information in a controlled, secure and auditable environment.
In case you've not heard of Alfresco, it started a few years ago with the intention of being a free Documentum but five times faster and ten times cheaper. The apparent conflict between 'free' and 'cheaper' is that anyone can download and run the software for free, but if they want support they can jolly well pay for it.
Since then, it has fully embraced the social networking world, blurring the boundaries between front office and back and putting content production and consumption into the hands of the many rather than the specialised few.
Company founder John Newton is a panellist at the Online Information conference next Thursday at 11:30. The debate will be about the death of proprietary content management. Wishful thinking? Or are these guys onto something?
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