Enterprise Social Networking and Collaboration Tools Don't Scale Up Easy

An interesting research was released at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference by independent analyst firm Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch) about how Enterprise social networking and collaboration tools that perform adequately at a departmental level can demonstrate surprising shortcomings when implemented enterprise wide.

Tony Byrne, principal of Real Story Group said, “Functional shortcomings or missing administrative services that don’t crop up in a departmental pilot can provide significant challenges when a customer tries to scale a system enterprise wide.”

Organizations are increasingly attempting to extend pilot collaboration and social software efforts across the enterprise, but IT leaders typically run into unexpected scalability problems.

“Customers should remember that many of these products matured in departmental environments,” said Byrne, “so in addition to investing in essential governance, adoption, and education programs, organizations that must support enterprise-wide collaboration and networking should carefully simulate large-scale conditions before committing to any single vendor.”

The firm’s Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report evaluates 27 offerings from around the world, including Atlassian, Awareness, bluekiwi, Drupal, Google (News - Alert) Apps, IBM/Lotus Connections, Jive, Microsoft SharePoint, Socialtext, and WordPress.

Real Story Group customer research uncovered ten significant common shortcomings, five of which include a lack of lifecycle management services, including archiving an absence of clustering and multi-instance management services, a clumsy or non-existent configuration management services and testing environments. The research also included an inability to integrate with enterprise role and group management (entitlements) systems and user interfaces that are not internationalized or localized.

“Not every vendor suffers from all of these weaknesses,” said Real Story group analyst Adriaan Bloem, “but even the most platform-like offerings from the likes of Microsoft and IBM (News - Alert) can come up short in one or more areas – much to the surprise of the customer assuming that a tool was explicitly designed for large-scale deployment.”

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