Products: Enterprise Community Networking Engine

On the Internet, social networking sites have revolutionized “people connectivity” in every kind of community, from Java programmers and Rap music aficionados. People show an almost limitless capacity to fill out long profiles about themselves, spell out their likes and dislikes in innumerable consumer categories, freely share their expertise and opinions on every conceivable topic, and seek out online conversations with hundreds of online “buddies.”

Yet inside organizations, it’s almost impossible to get people to share knowledge with the person in the next cubicle!

We believe the power of social networks can be translated to knowledge sharing inside organizations. When combined with the other elements of the SearchScience product suite – blogs, search, RSS, and taxonomy – enterprise community networking can generate the same explosion of knowledge sharing and collaboration we have seen on the Internet. The trick is to support and leverage the natural incentives that encourage people to form informal groups in any context, but customize and augment them to meet the needs and realities of organizational life.

Our Enterprise Community Networking Engine builds upon the core insights of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. It provides an infrastructure in which ”Salesmen”, “Mavens”, and “Connectors” can exercise their skills and instigate knowledge sharing epidemics throughout an organization.

  SearchScience Research Highlights

In our research we have explored the ideas behind business community networking with knowledge workers and executives in many different industries, across many areas of expertise. We have found a surprisingly degree of consistency in their articulation of the needs and challenges an enterprise-class community networking. Here are a few highlights from our findings:

• If we could organize around ideas rather than formal organizational boundaries, we could quickly break down barriers to innovation.
• When you can’t find out who knows what, you end up reinventing the wheel.
• My network is my most valuable business asset, and it was incredibly hard to develop over many years. I pity the new kids coming in today who don’t know anybody. How can we get them plugged in to the real experts in the company?
• We have informal communities, but no tools we can all access to work together.
• If I could magically gather up everything the experts in my community have written, it would be like finding a gold mine!
• If I didn’t have my informal network, I would not know where to go for advice.

  Differentiating Features

The SearchScience Enterprise Community Networking Engine includes a number of differentiating features that make it uniquely suited for supporting communities inside an enterprise:

• Enterprise taxonomy-enabled community identification and content tagging – ability to classify documents and web sites as relevant to a specific community.
• Enterprise community administration – ability to set up, monitor, and administer all enterprise communities from one central administrative console.
• Multi-level community access security – control over ability to see, post, or comment on community resources (blogs, documents, sites, discussion groups, etc.) based on community membership.
• Ability to specify a community leader or manager.
• Distinction between “committer status” community members (with write, post and update privileges), “contributor status” members (with read and comment privileges), and “observer status” members (with read-only privileges).
• Application of corporate document deletion policies to all community resources.
• Ability to identify internal experts based on community status and activity (integration with Expert Finder functionality).
• Automatic posting of community memberships in user profiles to streamline tagging and classification of community activities.
• Complete and seamless integration with Enterprise RSS, including “home page” alerts and notifications of community-based updates.
• Seamless integration with the Enterprise Blog Engine.
• Synchronization with Microsoft SharePoint Portals.
• Built-in rating and feedback system – ability to rate community members, community-relevant content, community-focused blogs and posts, etc. (customizable).

  Engine Technical Specifications

Search Science applications employ a modular and extensible architecture to support secure, scalable and reliable services. The Search Science Engines are designed to integrate smoothly into existing IT infrastructure.

• Integrates with existing IT LDAP/Active Directory Infrastructure
• Easy to use and maintain
• Deployed on Industry standard J2EE Application Servers
• Supports FOAF/XFN standards
• Supports Import/Export of user/group information from standard Messaging clients including Outlook and Eudora.
• Supports custom Adapters for CRM systems.

  Hardware Requirements

PC with 1 Ghz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 800MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system); Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended

• 1 gigabytes (Gb) of RAM or higher recommended
  (512 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
• 1.5 gigabytes (Gb) of available hard disk space
• CD-ROM or DVD drive

  Software Requirements

OS	:	Microsoft Windows 2000 Windows Advanced Windows 2000 Windows XP Pro
Database	:	Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Oracle 8i/9i
Application Server	:	JBoss 3.x/4.x WebLogic 8.x/9.x
Java	:	Sun JRE 1.4.x