Microsoft Yammer is a famous well described social collaboration tool for companies. The concept is similar to Confluence social intranet, Google+ for Intranets and Chatter from Salesforce. In the product description, happy employees are shown which have improved with the software their work routine. And in the handbook it is written how to do it in detail. But what exactly is a social enterprise software doing? Can the principle reduced to a minimum?
The intranet of a company contains at foremost of file which are stored on different webservers. If the network is configured the right way, all the files are accessable under a URL which has the format https://intranet/file1.html In theory this infrastructure allows the employees to work with the information. In reality it is not sufficient to provide only the technical infrastructure. There is a need for making the information easier to read.
A well known technique is an intranet fulltext search engine. This is the first technology a company will need. They can setup their own python scripts to fill a large scale textdatabase but they can use an out of the box solution. A fulltext search engine combines all the content under a single URL which is https://intranet/searchengine.html If the user types in a keyword, for example “salesreport” he gets a list of all the URLs which are containing the keyword.
A fulltext search engine will improve the information retrievel problem but it can't solve the entire issue. In most cases, the users doesn't know for which keyword they have to search and many of them doesn't like a machine generated index at all. What is needed additionally is a curated playlist of URL. The playlist contains all the URL which were recently updated. An example for such a list is:
1. monday:
new salesreport, URL
new meeting document, URL
2. tuesday:
new product catalog, URL
updated list of employees, URL
A naive approach to generate such a playlist is with a request to the search engine for recent updated files. Because the crawler bot is checking each day, what the status is of the entire network he will notice if new files are available in the index. And this information can be aggregated into a RSS stream. The problem with such automatic generated playlist is, that they will contain a lot of useless information. The better idea is to create the playlist of new URLs manual. This concept is known in the literature as “Social network”. The idea is, that the users the role of an URL DJ and they have to post URLs to a message board. Other users will see this information and can open the file.
What all the mentioned tools in the introduction like Yammer and Confluence Wiki have in common is, that they are supporting the feature “playlist of URLs”. The core feature of these tools is, that a user can post a link. Sounds a bit too simple to become powerful, but more is not needed. If somebody has found out how to use Yammer to post a link, he has understood the entire tool. More features are not included. That is the only important functionality.
The interesting point is, that without a fulltext search engine and without manual curated URLs the company's intranet will work the same. That means, the users can upload documents to the server, and they can download existing information. That means, an intranet can work without searchengines and without social networks great. The only missing point is, that the overall traffic is much lower. If the users doesn't post funny URLs to a message board, other user will not click on the file and this is equal to a lower bandwidth occupation.