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The intranet that’s social…

The Intranet that’s Social

Of late I’ve been spending far too much time than is healthy in some of the nitty gritty issues of a tactical deep dive with no less than 5 separate Jive Software installs and how they all connect with Active Directory, LDAP, synchronisation, permission structures, and the like. Added to this are topical projections on how to bridge them, create walled gardens, secure shared extranets and to connect to SharePoint, 2007 and 2010. And running along side this are mobile devices – iPhone, Blackberries, iPads and the like, integrating Outlook into the social layer and with these mobile gadgets, and synching it all with the Office suite.

Coming back up for air some thoughts come to mind.

1) The social intranet isn’t so much a social intranet, it’s an intranet that’s social. By this I mean the each of the data structures connecting to each other represent a sociality of things to which people engage at certain points.

2) An enterprise social network is aint nothing but a database with a nice GUI on top, with which people engage – they they engage with each other via the sociality of the things – Jive, AD, Outlook etc.

3) The mobile devices both fragment and unify the system

4) Microsoft holds it all together in the form of Active Directory (and that’s a lot of enterprises)

5) Rick is inherent and the only way of dealing with this is a flexible yet resolute approach

6) We live in interesting times…

All told though – what we’re creating, using, evolving and evolving with is a fluid layered and yet structured aggregation. And of course what I’m describing here is a mere technical layer, a schemata. What’s really interesting is not how this connects together, nor even how people connect together and with it. What’s really important is what they produce because of it, the physical, practical outputs it enables and engenders.

And what’s fun is this, we don’t know what that outcome might finally be…