Collaboration: Enterprise social takes root

“In some cases, employees feel like they can get in trouble if they share or they are intimidated. Business has to promote the freedom to be open and teach people how to use collaboration for business purposes.”

Social intranet

Noodle was developed by Vialect as a social intranet cloud solution in 2008, designed for organizations that wanted a collaboration platform that included social and document collaboration capabilities. It is built with simplicity in mind and can be set up in a single business day. “Marketing managers can administer the system and easily add content,” says Chad Siemon, technical consultant specialist at Noodle. “It is well suited to small to medium-sized businesses that may not have a dedicated IT staff.”

He adds, “As a social intranet, Noodle allows users to express themselves through their personal profile and share information about themselves, including photos, status updates and more.” As they can on Facebook, users can comment and “like” as well as follow specific co-workers. “Sharing and collaboration are key components of Noodle,” says Siemon, “and users can easily share content through an instant messaging app or notification e-mail.”

Most organizations that seek out Noodle have out-of-date processes and are sending out e-mail chains with documents attached from a foldering system, according to Siemon. “Some of our customers have older versions of SharePoint and want to modernize the capabilities of their intranet,” he says, “while others that did not have an intranet have grown to the point where they need one, and want a single platform to handle the social side including communication and document sharing.”

Siemon strongly agrees with the idea that culture is paramount. “From the user perspective, enterprise social software will be much more effective if the company promotes a culture of sharing. In some cases, employees feel like they can get in trouble if they share, or they are intimidated. Business has to promote the freedom to be open and teach people how to use collaboration for business purposes,” he says.

The success and usage of enterprise social software will depend on how well it fits into the employee’s workflow. According to Forrester, enterprise social software is being increasingly integrated with other enterprise applications such as document management and customer relationship management and will be supporting business-specific horizontal and vertical applications.In combination with the right culture, that enabling technology can sustain a rich landscape of collaboration.