Telligent Adds Mobile Features

Telligent on Tuesday announced mobile features for Telligent Enterprise and Telligent Community that can allow users to access content and collaborate via a new interface optimized for touch screen mobile devices.

Both Telligent Enterprise 2.6+ and Telligent Community 5.6+ now include mobile tools that can allow users of the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Torch, and Android phones to access content and collaborate wherever they happen to be.

Telligent co-founder and CTO Rob Howard said that mobile devices are acting as terminals for this corporate experience. "Ninety percent of the audience is consuming information," he said, and mobile is perfect for that.

"Say you're running a support community and your laptop is unavailable. You can build that community up in a mobile device. And when you interact with the mobile device you want a mobile experience. Mobile is a core piece of how people exchange information."

Mobility was part of Howard's vision when he helped launch Telligent in 2004, but work on integrating mobile devices into the Telligent platform did not begin in earnest until a year ago, he said.

"As our implementation evolved, we deployed it internally to connect with each other, externally so customers could connect, and we've worked with 12 enterprise partners to get their feedback," he said. What he found is "Mobile is core to how people work. I travel a lot and I expect when I go to my community or a customer that there should be a mobile experience." An intelligent mobile experience.

Placing this experience within Telligent gives CIOs some control over it, he added. "We're using a lot of the same technology enterprises would use to enforce their policies over their Intranet. An example is authentication through Active Directory. You need mechanisms the IT department approves."

And what are these "social experiences," Howard was asked. In large part it's the capture of past interactions and discussions, organized and searchable, along with tools linking that content to the community of people it came from.

"We believe the best way to get employees into these technologies is to find ways in which they already work, like email, and integrate social tools into those patterns. When an organization adopts social technology into their work patterns, people don't realize they're in a social ecosystem until one day they look for something, find it in search, link back to a community and find all this information is connected to them so they can complete their job.

Employees spend 30% of their time looking for the information they need. We want to take that percentage down. If we can it's a huge business win for the organization." Wherever its members happen to be.