Is it time to change your social platform?
May 7, 2013
CloudCow Contributed Article. Author: Evelyn Watts, PMM – Dell Software
In the long, long ago when social media was shiny and new, and people were MySpacing and AOLing with wild abandon, enterprises were trying to figure out what "Web 2.0" would actually mean for their business. New social tools, online applications and interactive websites with user-generated content were becoming very popular, and more and more employees were accessing these tools in their day-to-day workflow. Instant messages instead of email, blogs and wikis instead of static updates, cloud storage and file-sharing instead of networks and FTP ─ it was all changing.
Naturally, every new product or technology has early adopters, and those companies who jumped on board and opted for an enterprise social platform were definitely forward thinkers. The advantages of having an entire workforce communicating and collaborating in the same familiar environment, with the ability to share content, connect easily with other teams to share ideas and innovate quickly provided a huge competitive advantage.
Naturally, every new product or technology has early adopters, and those companies who jumped on board and opted for an enterprise social platform were definitely forward thinkers. The advantages of having an entire workforce communicating and collaborating in the same familiar environment, with the ability to share content, connect easily with other teams to share ideas and innovate quickly provided a huge competitive advantage.
But, adopting a social platform before having the chance to establish a long term social business strategy doesn’t mean a company is stuck with the platform. Many organizations learned the hard way that developing a culture of social collaboration requires a commitment to employee engagement, plus a long term strategy that allows for flexibility and innovation. Some were simply letting the social tools determine their strategy, rather than viewing the strategy as a key to supporting their overall vision.
Even though the enterprise social software market is still growing and highly competitive (Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the workplace (Sept. 2012) lists the top vendors as Jive software, IBM, Microsoft, Yammer(Microsoft), and Salesforce), you know it’s reaching a more mature state when customers are interested in switching social platforms to meet new strategic business objectives. In some cases, companies have decided that standardizing on a Microsoft infrastructure is a key component of their plan, and are looking to SharePoint to be both their content collaboration AND social communication platform.
So, what do you do if you already have a social platform and want to seamlessly move your data, users and content to SharePoint?
Well, every social platform is different, but they do share a variety of common data types, such as:
- User Profiles
- Blogs, Micro-blogs, Ideation Blogs, Wikis
- Documents, Files, Folders, Libraries
- Activities, Task Lists, Calendars
- Discussion Forums
- Bookmarks, Tags, Recommendations, “Likes”
- Content ratings, # Visits, Badges earned
- Social network (friends and coworkers)
- Newsfeeds, Activity streams
- Communities
That’s not to say that mapping data between disparate systems is easy. Each of these content types has a lot of detail behind them, including different properties, categorization metadata, authoring metadata, cross-referencing systems, and rules for how rich text and attachments are structured. Sometimes, there is a huge mismatch between the fundamental models.
Before you plan to migrate your enterprise social platform, you should consider the following:
Before you plan to migrate your enterprise social platform, you should consider the following:
- How would users be impacted by losing their social network and content?
- How will your employees react to the new environment?
- Are they already familiar with the new platform, or will you need to provide training?
- Will their content have the same look and feel after the move?
- Do they have to rebuild their network of contacts?
- What about security? Will content access and group permissions be preserved?
- Can the migration be automated to save time and reduce the risk of data loss?
- How easy is it to find out what social data you have, and select what you want to move?
- Do you have a vendor that can help?
Just as the need for greater collaboration brought about new technologies and social tools, so too are new social platform migration solutions needed to support your long term corporate strategy. The social data a company has generated over the years is a valuable business asset, and a business with an established social network is worth preserving.
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About the Author
Evelyn Watts is a product marketing manager for Dell Software, specializing in messaging and content migration solutions. She has spent nearly 15 years in the software industry, with experience in content management, product strategy, training, sales, field marketing and, of course, product marketing. When she isn’t doing her marketing thing, you can probably find her riding her motorcycle, learning some new crafty skill, or enjoying a nice glass of red wine with her husband.