You don't have to look far these days to find a vendor touting the benefits of implementing an enterprise activity stream solution. Activity streams are emerging as a favored alternative to everything from traditional employee collaboration tools to putting a new face on tired traditional enterprise applications. On one hand the activity stream paradigm is something we're become very accustomed to on the consumer social web with facebook, Google Wave, Google Buzz, etc. That makes the user interface and user experience very familiar and comfortable for most users. So what makes an effective activity stream? Here's what I think are basic requirements:
- Unified user interface that combines personal connections, user profile (private corporate social network), access to other constituents' profiles, email integration, microblog integration (public and provides a private microblogging tool or integration), public social network integration, integration to user selected enterprise applications, access to enterprise content and data, search.
- Ability to filter stream content based on user defined parameters
- Ability to form ad hoc workgroups
- Ability for user defined groups with security
- Ability to bring in non-members for ad hoc collaboration with security
- Integration with enterprise directory / LDAP
- Enterprise class security
- User configurable interface
What value do these tools offer?
- Increased employee interaction and collaboration
- More employee engagement and increase in satisfaction with a new UI for the enterprise
- A more familiar user experience
- Access to aggregated enterprise information and search
- Ability to form and manage ad hoc work teams and rapidly collect resources to deal with corporate issues
- One UI to manage the intersection of people, enterprise data, content, social data and enterprise applications.
- Enterprise performance increased due to better informed and managed decision making
- Ability to collaborate inside and outside the enterprise with appropriate security
- Enterprise security to answer IT concerns
Some providers of activity stream software:
- Jive Software
- Novell Pulse
- Salesforce.com Chatter
- SocialCast
- SocialText
- SuccessFactors (CubeTree acquisition)
- SugarCRM
Did I miss any solutions? What do you think about enterprise activity streams?
