Listen to the second part of my interview with Ross Mayfield, chairman, president and co-founder of Socialtext, a leading enterprise 2.0 collaboration and social networking vendor. In part one, we talked about How Social Messaging Works in the Enterprise.
In this podcast, hear how Socialtext's web-oriented architecture enables information mashups delivered to the desktop, and find out how Enterprise 2.0 solutions can cater to the older e-mail generation as well as those who've grown up with Facebook.
Listen to or download the 9:02 minute podcast below:
---Transcript---
PW: So Ross, when we were talking last week, we were talking about your new Twitter-like feature in Socialtext. And we were talking about how that's applied in the business environment.
RM: And it might be helpful to describe just really quickly a use case for that. So as an example, we have a customer that uses Socialtext in their support organization, so they use the wiki as a knowledge base for support. They use Socialtext People, our social networking offering, as a way to discover experts who might be able to resolve support problems. But now with Signals, our Twitter-like social messaging, they have a new capability of being able to ask questions and get answers, without forcing interruptions on people.
What's interesting is, we also launched Socialtext Desktop just a couple of weeks ago. It's an Adobe AIR application that brings together all of your Socialtext activity and an interface for posting your signals, and viewing signals, on your desktop.
And what it's really done is to transform Socialtext into more of a real-time application. All of our tools are lightweight, web-native and asynchronous. But when you have a desktop application that's polling the server every couple of seconds, where you can engage in conversations quicker, where you're alerted to these activity streams — notifications anytime somebody edits a wiki page, makes a blog post, makes a comment, modifies a profile or posts a signal — it really has changed the experience for our users wholeheartedly.
And so what's interesting is that Adobe AIR as a platform for us, I think, is really promising, in that it runs on all major operating systems. We only have to — we can release just one version and be able to update the software automatically at any time. And effectively what that gives us is a method of delivering software-as-a-service to a desktop, which is important because all of our — the way that we deliver — our software is all SaaS, whether it be through our hosted service, on-site SaaS appliance and now with this kind of SaaS desktop capability.
Right. And of course, AIR is this Adobe technology based on, or taking Adobe Flex, but actually moving it outside of the browser. So that it's still served from the network but it actually exists on the desktop rather than needing to boot up the browser first.
Yeah, so it's a rich internet application that, because it's based on the desktop, gains additional persistence, and then also can operate at a different speed necessarily.
Right. And of course the other thing is this is real-time updating, so it's kind of a mashup platform as well, which is — I'm using that as a segue into — because mashups I think is something that you do in quite a few of your platforms. You've done a lot of work with wikis and also in adapting spreadsheet technology for collaboration and bringing together different bits of information. How much of that are you going to bring into this desktop or does that remain a separate thing?
So we have a web-oriented architecture. It's principally centered around this REST API. We've separated the backend to the front end, and anybody who wants to perform an action that a user could, you could do that through the REST API. And what's interesting is that, so of course, Socialtext Desktop talks to the rest of the Socialtext platform through this REST API. It is the enabler for it.
And actually all of the different product modules we have, you know, it's an integrated yet modular platform. And so as an example, the way that social networking accesses content from Workspaces, filters its rights and permissions, or inherits those from Workspaces, that's done again through the REST API. The mashup potential is in, principally by having that API, plus we have a product that's called Socialtext Dashboard, it's the personalized, customizable dashboard for a user to help manage their attention and interaction, not just across Socialtext but also other enterprise systems and other web-based systems.
So what we've done is to support the OpenSocial standard for widgets, a standard originated by Google, and there's over 100,000 widgets that have been written according to this standard. And what the widget framework gives us is a standards-based, at the very least, UI framework for people to very quickly create a mashup leveraging our API and another system's API, and then to be able to deliver that to users through this desktop UI construct.
Right. Okay. So now, it sounds to me as though people need a whole lot of new skills really to get to grips with this type of application. Although you very much target the enterprise market, it sounds to me like you're probably better suited to working with this kind of application if you've already got experience with Facebook and maybe something like the iGoogle desktop or Pageflakes or NetVibes. Do you find that it's a younger type of organization profile that is a faster adopter of your technology?
So we have to develop our technology with affordances for all generations and all kinds of users. This isn't like — if I was to develop a Web 2.0 application or community on the Web, I could design first for the earliest adopters. But when you deploy enterprise-wide, maybe populating the social networking directory using the company's LDAP or Active Directory, and giving it a 'big bang' fast start for everybody in the company, what ends up happening is you have to make it work for everybody and that includes the e-mail generation. So it's fantastic —
Yeah, people like me.
You blog and ...
Okay, okay that's true. I haven't yet got onto Facebook or Twitter so I'm still a bit of a laggard there.
But that's okay. The point is for most people, they know how to login, browse around and take advantage of knowledge by searching and browsing through websites like a wiki. And what we've done is to make it easy for them to work through Socialtext otherwise, leveraging e-mail. You send an e-mail to a workspace, the title of the e-mail becomes the title of the page. The body of it becomes the body of the page and if there's a file attached, it attaches. But so what's important though is that — let me give you an example — we have a major construction company that's going through real seismic shifts and they're using Socialtext to address that.
The first shift is, they've got a third of their workforce retiring in five years and that part of the e-mail generation really has the core competencies of the firm — of large-scale logistics and project management — and they need to be passed on. The second challenge that they have is, their aggregate head count is growing — even through the recession — and is projected to grow over the next five years. And the way that they're doing that is recruiting the Net Generation, the 16 to 24 year olds just entering into the workforce. It's the biggest demographics shift that's ever happened.
At the same time, this construction firm is also having to weather the recession. In other words, that means they have to do more with less. They have to work more efficiently. And the way that you get productivity gains isn't by forcing more productivity out of an individual, it's the way that you align and co-ordinate your resources the way that people work together. But the last shift that they're going through is developing a whole new organizational capability as a transition to green materials and methodologies to meet the demands of more sustainable practices as a firm. And that's a lot of knowledge to generate and apply very quickly to meet the changing demands in the workplace.
And does it help to have these kind of collaboration experts from Generation Y coming into that workforce, because they can actually spread some of those collaboration skills and perhaps teach the older generation a thing or two as well?
They definitely — they work differently and it is more social, it is more collaborative, it is more transparent. And what is fantastic is, they have grown up during their homework on Facebook, right. And what you'll find is they will take to the technology a lot faster. They may not necessarily have the expertise to provide, to share all the right knowledge. But what they can do is take advantage of the contributions of others and re-factor or reorganize those, and go through and energize the base of what a community within an organization can be.
I think that's really interesting that the way you do your homework can equip you for the workforce. Because I used to do my homework listening to rock music and I don't think any prospective employers were going to be impressed by that. So maybe we have made an advance there.
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