Chatter and SharePoint and Social Sites and LinkedIn API and work and....

SF's category-endorsing 'Chatter' pre-announcement is driving some good conversation about fundamental requirements for successful enterprise social computing. LinkedIn's API announcement today is adding to the stream.

1.5 million end-users have taught us that enterprise social computing is about helping people work more effectively.   Faster innovation, better collaboration and easier expertise discovery happen when social is part of the workflow; the data is integrated; and it's all accessible to everyone anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Some specifics:

1.    A single profile is vital to maximize key value propositions like expertise location
2.    No walled gardens.  The more open the data flows the better – in part to optimize the profile, but more generally to optimize the end-user’s opportunity to gain actionable relevant information and connections (cf. workflow integration below).
3.   More participation = better.  
4.   Security and scalability and governance = vital.

And, two memes that need more travel:

1.     Mobile, and messaging, are rapidly becoming much more important than most vendors are considering
2.    Integration with Workflow.  As the McKinsey study late this summer found, enterprise 2.0 capabilities like wikis, blogs, microblogging, RSS, activity streams etc. are most used when tightly integrated into workflows.  Competing for attention is hard and will get much harder.  Every piece of software/ every element of the workflow will be inherently collaborative.   That all needs to be seamless to the individual.

All of these are central tenets behind the design of our Social Sites offering.

1.    Single profile.  We've targeted the SharePoint installed base partly because that allows us to enhance existing profiles rather than creating another silo'd profile store.
2.    No walled gardens.  The more data in and out the stronger the network.This is a critical design point for us.   Our activity streams and microblogging ‘watch’ over 30 event-types now – and will ‘watch’ more.  More generally, any information from any internal or external system can be an event type for Social Sites --- claim your twitter stream (or 'chatter'), bring in external premium content, integrate your external social network (woo hoo for linkedin's API announcement today -- connections and status integration!) – all these are choices our customers can and do make today.
3.    More participation = better.  SharePoint is already accessible by well over 100 million seats worldwide. The 2010 version is an important evolution for SharePoint as an enterprise application platform ; better scalability, administration, and business intelligence, and a stronger social platform we can leverage to integrate more and more workflow.
4.    Security, scalability, and governance = vital.   Our partners have found that it’s critical to make sure the conversation, and more critically the work involved with the conversation, happens in an environment which is appropriately governable.  E-mumbling isn’t different from email; ultimately companies are on the hook for that conversation, too.
5.    Mobile and messaging.  Smartphones and notebooks are THE primary microprocessor growth area for Intel now.   This has been a central focus for us since our first mobile readers a few years ago. We introduced our iPhone Social Sites app a few weeks ago.  Stay tuned for much much more.
6.    Workflow integration.  A primary adoption driver for Social Sites has been Communities --- easy-to-create-and-manage places where anyone with common interests or practices can microchat  where the rest of the tools they need to do real collaborative work are available.   More and more enterprise applications are opening up to the collaborative work available from primary enterprise application platforms like SharePoint.

All of this has happily helped us bring social computing to 200 of the Global 2000 over the last 18 months.  All the new conversations are keeping us busier than ever.