Where Are Enterprise 2.0 Dashboards?

The BrainYard - Where collaborative minds congregate.

Irwin Lazar, Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

January 18, 2009

2 Min Read

The more time I spend toying with social computing applications and services such as Twitter, and Facebook, the more I wonder when we can expect to see Enterprise 2.0 dashboards.

The Enterprise 2.0 dashboard could do a few things:

  • Unify my view into social networks, allowing me to combine updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and other social networks. I should be able to add RSS feeds, and ideally, this would also serve as the home for my mailbox. In the enterprise, the likely dashboard is Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes, or perhaps Mail for Mac. On the consumer/SaaS side, I'd expect that we'll see movement by web-based e-mail services such as Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail to either partner with or acquire existing social network services, or add their own social networking capabilities to their own email services The wildcard here appears to be Facebook, which I'm guessing could capture a significant percentage of the web mail market simply by evolving its current messaging system into a fully featured mail client capable of interfacing with not only Facebook users, but any e-mail service.

  • Unify my public facing services - today I have a blog, a twitter feed, a facebook status, linkedin status, etc., but little ability to integrate the various services into a public facing dashboard that would enable those who want to follow my various feeds to have one place to look. Yes, there is already some level of integration. For example, I've configured my blog to display tweets in the right-hand side column, but they don't get pushed out to those who subscribe to my blog via RSS.

Finally, dashboards should incorporate presence from IM services, or perhaps even from enterprise IM systems, perhaps via the ability to set up XMPP presence propagation/importation.
On the enterprise side, dashboard integration with expert tagging/indexing and collaboration applications such as SharePoint, IBM Lotus Connections and Alfresco would further serve to unify various applications and services. In this environment I could right click on someone's name in my in-box, see their presence status, access their Twitter feed, see their Flickr pictures, learn what projects they are working on, and see how others have tagged their expertise.

As others have noted, Xonbi appears to be the first effort to integrate social networks with e-mail, perhaps it will be remembered as the first effort to build the Enterprise 2.0 dashboard?

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About the Author(s)

Irwin Lazar

Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

Irwin Lazar is the Vice President and Service Director at Nemertes Research, where he manages research operations, develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research, and advises numerous enterprise and vendor clients. Irwin is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in areas including VOIP, UC, video conferencing, social computing, collaboration, contact center and customer engagement.

A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Irwin is a blogger for No Jitter and frequent author for SearchUnifiedCommunications.com. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press and is regular speaker at events such as Enterprise Connect and Interop. Irwin's earlier background was in IP network architecture, design and engineering.

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