A couple of weeks back we started an internal project called !sweet to pilot an Enterprise microblogging service.
We defined following project objectives
- Learn how to apply microblogging in an enterprise
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- Technical: how easy would it be to integrate such a service ?
- Business: what should we do with it ?
- Build an internal open source community
- motivate people to participate in an internal open source project
- capture ideas from various teams and implement it quickly
- Have some fun :-)
It took us about 3 weeks to get the pilot up and running and since about 4 weeks we are running the pilot.
Lesson learned so far
- internal micro blogging is about “What are you working on” and not “What are you doing ?”
- integration into existing social services is key (SunSpace, Enterprise search)
- ease of use and ease of access is key (email, SMS, microblogging clients)
- Microblogging has to be a complementary service -not just a “new tool/toy”
- user want to access this service from the Internet – not from the Intranet
!sweet is based on Laconica and has following features (bold are own extensions)
- Corporate LDAP integration and SSL support
- Dynamic user profile creation
- Twitter gateway ( 2 buttons :-) )
- SMS-out
- email-in
- Micro blogging clients support like twhirl
- Badge support
- Enterprise search integration
- Regular expression engine
- Smileys support
- RSS and ATOM feed extensions (userID and tags for search integration)
Entry page
SunSpace integration (Badge)
SunSpace integration (feed)
Search integration
- !sweet as a search collection
- show last three !sweet’s in the persons search result