Awareness – Enterprise 2.0 Social Media Platform

Here is another cross post from my series on Enterprise 2.0 tools on the Fast Forward blog. Awareness, the social media software platform formerly known as iUpLoad, provides a common platform for all the current social media tools and capabilities that are being used in a business context (blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, social book marking, tagging, mashups, photo sharing, video sharing, forums, discussion groups, etc.) I recently met with Eric Schurr, the Vice President for Marketing who shared with me an overview of their capabilities and some client success stories.

Eric mentioned that Awareness has a single architecture for all forms of user-generated content (e.g., text, video, photos, etc.) that operates in a uniform fashion across all forms of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, forums, mashups, etc.) User-generated content is also captured and stored with profile information about the user who generated it. This allows you to gather content through any channel (e.g., blog. wiki) and share it thorough any other channel, while retaining the context of the author who generated it. For example, a blog entry can be repurposed as an entry in a wiki, or an email can be automatically shared as a blog entry. I think this capability addresses one of the potential problems with enterprise 2.0, the proliferation of many siloed tools that do not integrate easily. Awareness also contains the features required for scalable enterprise deployment (integration with single sign-on and identity management systems, security, versioning and compliance, auditing, and backup and recovery) as it is purpose-built specifically for enterprise use, It also integrates with other tools such as Sharepoint, Salesforce.com, and Google Maps.

This common architecture allows for participation through a variety of channels, including contributing to a branded blog, adding or editing wikis, completing a submission form, mobile submissions from any portable device, making comments, joining discussions, voting and rating. etc. You can also stay within email and have your submission appear within one of the enterprise channels. There are viral tools that allow individuals to invite friends to their site, email posts to a friend, receive alerts on updates, and receive and monitor comments and trackback. As mentioned above, each participant develops a profile that stays connected to their content as it passes through the enterprise and across all channels.

Community administrators are given functions to oversee and moderate a community including customizable rules-based workflow, specification of user groups and permissions, edit controls, and metrics and reporting to monitor and measure the community’s activities. Administrators are given control over who can post user-generated content; determine who can read which content; automatically approved, reject, categorize, or flag postings based on their content; edit or modify postings. While these features could be misused to place too much control over the openness that enterprise 2.0 hopes to generate, I think they provide useful functionality that may reduce the concerns of senior executives. They make it easier to exercise appropriate business monitoring and control and reduce the need for more heavy-handed or primitive control.

There are more features but I think these are the high impact ones. Enterprise 2.0 needs common platforms like Awareness to avoid the pitfalls of siloed deployment and the security concerns that have shown up in surveys. I am pleased to see such tools emerge and I am very impressed with what Awareness has accomplished. It is the most comprehensive solution I have seen so far. When the firm first started as iUpload, the blogging aspect of the platform got more attention as that was the news sponge in 2004-2005. However, they were always a broader platform and as blogging and other individual tools evolved to become enterprise 2.0, the need for broader platforms has become more apparent. Others agree that Awareness addresses this need and their investors include Greylock and Northbridge who also support some big players in the web 2.0 world: Facebook, Linkedin, digg, and Red Hat. Forrester’s Charlene Li gave them the highest marks amongst enterprise blogging systems in her Blogging Platform report of Q2 2006. This appears well deserved. Tomorrow, in my next post I will share some of the client stories that Eric provided. enterprise 2.0 enterprise tagging web 2.0 enterprise social media enterprise blogs enterprise wikis business blogs enterprise social media