Social Networking Tools for Business Can't Come Too SoonSocial Networking Tools for Business Can't Come Too Soon

There have been a more than a few articles lately about the value of social networking tools like Facebook and My Space in the work place. One example is The Motley Fool's July 23rd article, Facebook: Tool or Toy. A number of articles were prompted by a Gartner press release issued last week to hype a recent report, "Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation."

There have been a more than a few articles lately about the value of social networking tools like Facebook and My Space in the work place. One example is The Motley Fool's July 23rd article, Facebook: Tool or Toy. A number of articles were prompted by a Gartner press release issued last week to hype a recent report, "Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation."Gartner apparently urges companies not to ban the use of social networking applications but instead to find a way to control their use. In the context of No Jitter, and its emphasis on IP communications and UC, my question for our community is why communications vendors haven't done a better job of creating business collaboration tools that take the best of social networking and combine them with the enterprise controls IT departments are looking for.

When I think back to the very first demonstration I saw of Siemens' OpenScape, at an analyst meeting in Las Vegas in February 2003, one noteworthy aspect of the offering was the desktop application. In hindsight, it included many of the components one might imagine an enterprise version of social networking might include, e.g., presence status, ability to create workgroups and conferences, a way to share documents, etc.

If OpenScape was arguably the first instantiation of unified communications, it begs the question of why UC in general hasn't continued to advance and morph into something that fills the role in the business world that Facebook and My Space do in the consumer space. If anything, based on a recent viewing of a working version of OpenScape on a Siemens manager's desktop, there seem to be fewer collaborative features employed in everyday use than might have been implied by the early prototypes.

This is by no means a specific dig at Siemens, but more a judgment on the direction all UC applications seem to be taking. With the phenomenal success of social networking, and the clearly not so phenomenal success of UC to date, perhaps communications application vendors should be more aggressively moving in a social networking direction. There's something addictive about Facebook...how do we make UC the same?