Friday, February 8, 2008

Can I “Poke” My Colleagues?


Social networking can be used in the enterprise if we take popular ideas from sites like Facebook and Myspace and incorporate them in a controlled environment where collaboration and shared distribution of business documents can be managed. The latest article from CMSWire shows us how the Ektron Intranet has done just that in order to bridge the gap between the corporate intranet and social networking.

Employees are able to create personalized information pages and search for business documents in a timely manner within this portal. Intranets are generally used for finding employee information, HR documents, and IT documents, but Ektron is taking it a step further by connecting various offices together and building a distinct corporate culture. William Rogers, CEO of Ektron Inc., shared his thoughts:

“The last place most managers are going to think to look for ideas on how to increase workforce productivity would be Internet sites like MySpace or Facebook. However, as deployed on the Ektron Intranet, the same tools that make employees want to spend their personal time on social networking sites, will get them interacting on your intranet in a way that they are comfortable with and that has real business value”

With the growing number of younger executives, corporate intranets will have to begin to shift into the new age in order to keep productivity at its maximum. Social networking and Web 2.0 is here to stay, let us start applying this into the business realm.

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