Social Networking for Business at Enterprise 2.0

Social Networking for Business at Enterprise 2.0 Justin Mysinger: Several vendors were on hand in Boston this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Developers such as Microsoft, IBM and Socialtext Reader mold the latest incorporate social networking. Online collaboration website’s Socialtext showed its latest edition to shareable web-based spreadsheet. The online spreadsheet allows for graphs and charts and to be link back into the larger Socialtext website centering around sharing Blogs, Wikies and Word Processor documents. Dan Bricklin: It’s not uncommon if you want to express yourself in the way that you stress in spreadsheet as supposed to in Word Processor. Most of the pages are basically under the Word Processor pages but sometimes you want to express yourself in a two dimensional way with numbers and calculations and look up some things like that boxes and lines and you need a spreadsheet to do that. That’s what we’re working for. Justin Mysinger: Bricklin was actually the co-inventor of spreadsheets with his development of basic calc in early 1980s. He says social networking is necessary in the modern distributed business world. Dan Brickin: It’s a tool or way of expressing yourself in collaboration that you need to have to be able to break down barriers between people that you would normally wouldn’t have-- The people are actually is all together in this small office to talk to each other and you need to have software that facilitates that. Justin Mysinger: Seemingly, echoing Bricklin’s philosophy, IMB was touting Lotus note at the same time. It gives users several different types of messaging options ranging between phone calls to text messages to email to video conferencing. Real time information about what device the person is using would be viewable to others allowing messages to be sent by the best possible medium. Jim Cavalier: You may want to send them an instant message but you maybe more inclined to give them a phone call if you know that for example, they’re at their desk and they’re not on their phone. Or if you can see that they are on their phone, you might send them an instant message instead. Justin Mysinger: Microsoft promoted two projects underdevelopment. The first is called Salsa, and integrate with Microsoft Outlook to aggregate information about each one of the outlook contacts. Kristin Stecher: What we’ll do is we will sort of create a side pane and you will have a little photo. And if you type someone’s name in, for instance over here you’ll see Shane. And if I type Shane’s name in, you will see a photo of him and underneath that you’ll see some share points files that she’s sharing with other members in the organization and you might also see recent emails that you share with him, and you would also see his friends who are just people he has emailed most frequently or most recently. Justin Mysinger: Well, Microsoft wouldn’t share deployment plans. The company is already looking to enhance its capabilities beyond the outlook. Microsoft research also displayed its next generation inbox code named Valves. Valves is taunted as a social inbox that takes the information gathered by Salsa and automatically organizes it into adjustable groups based on anything indexed in the shared emails or files. Valves doesn’t actually alter any emails but it does apply filters to help users quickly find the information they may need. No real estates have been revealed for either project yet. From Enterprise 2.0 in Boston I’m Justin Mysinger, IDG News Service.