Go-Go Social Business at The Speed of Light: That's the Chatter!

The continuation of the wikinomic movement of collectiveness composed of open-sharing, peering, and acting globally on collaborations has yielded sustainable software that supports these efforts. Of course, open source software and public standards are two of the most popular forms of open development used by industry practitioners but social networking websites is the technology that is most widely used by all user audiences, regardless of expert level. Social enterprises benefit heavily from the interactive communications sparked by these dynamic virtual connections. Social networking webs provide an excellent platform to deliver subjected information and link people who share common beliefs or interests. Business enterprises have an insatiable desire to communicate to its customer base and thus stimulate base expansion through contact exposure gathered from the "friends" group of their active client relations presented in social networking linkage. Social enterprise software such as Chatter makes CRM management through social networking platforms available as an open source software available to any proprietary company.

Salesforce , a leading SaaS provider and a manufacturer of digital sales management software, has recently released Chatter to its CRM platform arsenal. Many traditional HRM and CRM platforms are also working on incorporating a social theme to their software releases. Consequently, we can expect to see social features integrated in most COTS software in future iterative releases, since this capability has become an expected requirement of all modern software. This trend is being fueled by the evolution of business applications becoming smaller in disk size while increasing web-based components that are mobile, portable and self-service oriented. The robustness of access, availability, and authentication to all relevant real-time information has become the pinnacle in business continuity regardless of location and office network access. Entrepreneurs and consultants thrive from the ability to conduct business from the palm of their hand by harnessing the force of their smartphone tapped into the appropriate medium.

Applications such as Chatter will offer a Social Intranet to include peer generated content, common social apps, social networking platforms (i.e. Twitter, Facebook), and a local app store. The Rich User Profile will offer a social identity, social contacts, activity stream, and individual social apps. The Intranet User Experience will provide the most used combination of a browser, mobile access, mashups, and email integration. Social enterprise applications, such as the discussed example, offers a convergence of all of the most used Internet technologies in a single Intranet 2.0 platform that is custom fit vehicle for any organization as a purchasable Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software.

As of 2011, two-thirds of firms now have at least one social media capability on their private Intranet. Social computing platforms can be developed internally or purchased from a third party vendor, however, its central concept is tracking your social business activities. The breakthrough networking model that is essential in this new software development is OpenSocial, an interoperable enterprise social open standard sponsored by Google. It is actively supported by Jive, Cisco, SocialText, Atlassian, IBM, SAP, and other top software vendors. OpenSocial defines a common social app model for web-based portals adhering to this standard. The Internet barrel of interesting creations is like the artificial Inspector Gadget of the new digital era of computing. Go-Go social business at the speed of light!