Check out the above screencast of a Twitter-like service built for “enterprise” use, ESME. It’s actually pretty impressive.
In this demo, allowing people to do time-shifted/near real-time trouble-shooting. While they manage to cram just about every buzz-technology into the short demo (Scala, AIR, and even cloud computing!), it’s actually a well done example of how something Twitter-like could be used in a company to do “real work.”
Also, it reminds us that when it comes to automating and enhancing collaboration – “Enterprise 2.0,” to be erroneously broad-stroking – anything beyond a shared, real-time whiteboard is probably too complicated and specialized to work broadly in business settings.
People in the SAP community came up with this project with much help from all several tangentially-SAP-y folks and net-people. Even more interesting than the technology itself is how and if SAP-proper would work towards knocking that trailing “E” off “ESME.”
See Marshall’s post and Oliver Mark’s post for more background and commentary. Also, it looks like something similar is up in Oracle-land.
Disclosure: SAP is a client, as is Adobe.
Noel's OraTweet is a side/for-fun project of his. It came to my attention b/c as a skunkworks, we attract a lot of people's side projects, which is great.
I've encouraged Noel to create an OpenSocial version of his OraTweet app to deploy in our internal OS container, Connect, which we're putting the finishing touches on now.
OpenSocial will be how we foster all these side projects and apps that people want, and we plan to deploy it externally to Mix, our network outside the firewall for the whole Oracle community to enjoy.
Cool stuff abounds within enterprises like Oracle and SAP.
The narrator of this screencast needs to take a deep breath and SLOW DOWN.
The thing about all of these collaboration tools is that they don't do a thing if the business folks aren't INTERESTED to collaborate. The engineering guys who think the entire marketing team is wasting space – they sure as heck don't want a deeper level of interaction with those morons (electronic or otherwise). The C-level dolt whose inane "real world" babbling is already unbearable? – congrats, now he's got advanced tooling to assault people with.
When I was a kid and getting dragged to church every Sunday against my will and missing all the primo NFL games, I don't think the deal would have been any more attractive if the preacher or sunday school teachers were available on Skype, Twitter or OraTweet. In fact, that would have been terrifying.
Sometimes communication problems aren't because of lack of technology. They're because people don't like a lot of the people they work with, and intentionally avoid talking with them. I cringe at the phrase "cultural change" – but in this case, these collaborative tools are not going to fly on mass scale at most present office environments.
The more these things pop up, the more I love Skype (and respect the features / creativity that went into its original design). Not to mention Atlassian and the chord they struck with developers in enabling their collaboration. There's something to be said for that "just enough" point, and being sophisticated enough not to just facilitate noise, but to allow your audiences to communicate in a manner that actually fits their motivations / approach. Few of the collaborative / enterprise 2.0 products out there can touch Skype or Atlassian in this respect, IMHO.
TravisV, you must check out cyn.in (http://cyn.in) an enterprise collaboration software. cyn.in applications (wiki, blog, file repository, image gallery, version control, discussion, event calender, search, statuslogs etc) delivers collaborative organizational knowledge to an enterprise and cyn.in's user experience encourages users to contribute his/her bit in the system.