How to Build Your Own Social Network in the Enterprise for Fr...

I really need to devle into this more. I'm a huge pronent of bringing social applications into the enterprise. It takes baby steps and a TON of educating people, as I'm finding out in my own workplace. What I'm also finding is that SharePoint (WSS and MSS) is almost unilaterally underused. Even those places with more foreward thinking IT folks tend to just use it as a place to put stuff so someone else can get it. That's potentially a pretty explensive "place to put stuff"!

A part of the problem, as I'm seeing it, is that there is often a knowledge gap between the ones that deal with moving data (i.e. bits and bytes and firewalls and things) and the ones that deal with moving information around. You woudn't think that this would be, but, case in point, a co-worker recently asked me what a wiki was. While I was explaining, my brain was like, "Dude, you spend eight hours a day buried in code, and you don't know what a wiki is?!" But people learn what they need to perform their job functions and anything not on that list is unfamiliar, and a threat to their expertise.

I bookmarked Paisano's (excellent) article because I think that WSS is a great way to comfortably begin rolling out social applications across the network. People know Microsoft. They generally consider a Microsoft application "safe" for enterprise use. Enterprise has pretty much accepted the fact that, to be in business means to be on the web. But today, that's no longer enough. The web is social and it is moving. Web 2.0 is not longer a trend; it's an expectation. An enterprise that does not embrace this is walking the plank while tied to a cannon ball.