Mopsos

Yesterday, together with my colleague Ricardo Sueiras of PwC UK, we had a demo of Connectbeam the entreprise social bookmarking appliance. Connectbeam is an enterprise social networking tool using shared bookmarks and tags as a way to connect people. Basically it connects people who use the same content, on the grounds that it is likely that they have similar activities or interests, and will benefit from knowing each other.

Connectbeam raises a few IP questions as usual with respect to who owns what, the company or me. But still, it looks like a great knowledge sharing solution for the corporate world. We still are in a world where corporate people do write short blackberry e-mails and client deliverables, but do not publish what they know in the form of blog posts or wiki pages. It will change some day, and maybe suddenly, but not now, at least not in this country (France). So building and managing links across people and content - which is what KM is really about - should work much better if it's based on the current demand-oriented and quite selfish behaviors of the average corporate employee. As such, social bookmarking tools such as Connectbeam could be seen as the stepping stone to the cultural change we all want to see taking place.

In the open world, collaboration tools work when people get hooked and sometimes even addicted to a new experience that's real fun (and incidentally useful). But users also get turned off easily, and they move on to something else, because we're talking about very elementary forms of collaboration anyway. In companies, where people have built a common and quite sophisticated collaboration culture over time to get things done, they usually work when they are transparent add-ons or replacements to current tools for mainstream employees, which is what social bookmarking could be as an add-on to search and people directories. I don't believe too much in the power of bottom-up approaches whereby underground tools used by rogue insiders gradually become mainstream, and I still haven't found a single company, at least in my country, where employees are actually encouraged to innovate and to experiment new ways of doing business unless there is a clear business case of cost reduction.

More about Connectbeam hereunder:

Good things about Connectbeam

1 Profiling
Connectbeam provides an environment where users are in control of the bookmarks they want to share and those they want to keep to themselves. In other words, if I find an interesting content, I can decide whether it's important for the company as a whole, for a given community inside the company (CoI, CoP, project team etc.) or just for me. So as a user, I will only be given access to the bookmarks and tag clouds I am allowed to see, i.e. those from the communities I belong to.

2 integration with search engines
Connectbeam can be used as a front end to several community specific search engines (google, wikipedia, your company search engine, and even your blog search engine...), which means that it can become your homepage for search as well as providing social bookmarking features to all those searches. Think about integrating del.icio.us inside Google.

3 Integration of external bookmarks
If you have already bookmarked a lot of web pages using del.icio.us for example, you can import those into Connectbeam, thereby integrating them into your working environment and allowing colleagues to benefit from them. Of course you can select which ones you want to keep to yourself, those you want to share with a given community, and those you want ot share with the entire company.

4 community features
Connectbeam allows you to create "communities", defined as a group of people who share a collection of bookmarks. You can create a community, describe what it does and invite people to join. One of the nice features too is that you can make this community public (anyone can join and the tag cloud is visible to all) or private (by invitation only and the tag cloud is invisible). The bet is that sharing content is the first step to building a community, which means that an administrator of Connectbeam can see in real time what communities are being formed and which ones should get closer to one another.

5 Recent activity
The recent activity page tells you in real time what content is being used, what is popular, and what is not, which can be pretty useful as a sounding board of the company's mood.

6 Integration with the employee directory
With connectbeam, an employee can be also characterized by her tag cloud and the communities she belongs to, which is a very powerful way of knowing what she's up to.

What is questionable

7 IP rights, again
Why would my social bookmarks belong to my company? I have no doubts that whatever I bookmark in the context of an assignment my company has given to be is company property. But what about the rest? As a user of Connectbeam, I would think twice before importing my del.icio.us bookmarks in Connectbeam. And what about those cross-company communities which are really the most important business-wise. Who owns its bookmarks if not the community itself and the sponsoring organizations? 

8 Integration with SSO
But that is currently being sorted out.

9 Integration in communities
Social bookmarking as a solitary activity can be described with quite simple search-oriented use cases. In the context of a community, use cases can be very different from one community to another (community of
interest, brainstorming group, project team etc.) which suggests other forms of content integration, stronger discipline on the use of tags, and more generally more stringent rules of engagement, including social bookmarking.

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