Corporate intranets via SaaS are the future but are not without risk

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Risk is relative

(disclosure: i am with an enterprise social media vendor, www.awarenessnetworks.com)

I agree with the content of this article, and would emphasize that the "risk" mentioned in the headline is relative to the three different scenarios mentioned by Jeremiah.

It's important to evaluate risk and appropriateness relative to the vendor's focus. One might say that using Facebook for business purposes has a lot of "risk" because they can't do things like single-sign-on integration, administrator-controlled security & permissioning, etc. That's a valid way of looking at it, but it's important to remember that applications like Facebook were never meant for the enterprise (i.e. business use) and they are not going to be optimized for it. Therefore, there is a lot of "risk" when using these types of applications for business purposes.

However, there are offerings designed specifically for enterprise deployment, and the "risks" of using them are much less. Any good social media vendor designed for business use must support single-sign-on, integration with enterprise search engines, deep security & permissioning, etc. These options are all available from white-label social meedia SaaS vendors, and they present very little, if any, risk.

Of course, ERP-type vendors like IBM, etc. that provide social features on applications don't have much "risk" associated with them, but as Jeremiah points out they are usually quite inflexible.

Posted by: elschurr   Posted on: 06/19/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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