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An interesting report from McKinsey Global Survey about the impact of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.

While they don’t specifically mention any vendors they do share some details on how customers are adopting Web 2.0 technologies and what the various satisfaction levels are.

A couple of things that stood out for me, and possibly just do to a lack of the analysts really understanding the market:

• Web Services and peer-to-peer were listed as Web 2.0 tools alongside blogs, RSS, Podcasts, etc. This type of comparison always strikes me as a little odd since some of these are protocols and others are solutions.
• The term “Mash Ups” seems to be making a come back. This is the second time in as many days I’ve seen this term in different reports.

You can download the report here (after registering on their site)

Someone recently introduced me to a new term: "knowledge trails".

Knowledge trails represent one of the ways that communities add value to any organization. Whereas phone calls, email, and face-to-face conversations happen once and can’t easily be reused – Enterprise 2.0 solutions promote and encourage reuse. Thus a knowledge trail is the conversation, files, media and anything else associated with a conversation that can allow for the knowledge created in the conversation to be reused multiple times.

A great example that we see often is as simple as taking team, departmental, or company-wide emails and transfering them into a blog instead. Instead of the communication happening one time, the message is delivered multiple times and new team members or employees can read and take part in surrounding conversations.

The fall release of Community Server 2008 — officially Community Server 2008.5 — beta 1 is now available!

More details and downloads here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WK_xVc1pqA&feature=dir

A great video interview with Andy Lark of Dell (VP of Global Marketing) who talks about how important social media is at Dell.

Recently Dell consolidated many of its social media solutions on Telligent’s Community Server platform. 

This article about how online networks are the new focus group written last January is one of the virtual clippings that helped validate a lot of what we’ve been working on in our analytics / BI tool: Harvest.

There are lots of great analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to help you understand where people are going in your site, but few to help you understand what they are doing. It’s analogous to having a party and at the end being able to say: 100 people came to the party because 100 people knocked on my door. Of those 100 people 60 went to the living room and then the kitchen, etc.

So what traditional BI tools don’t address is: who were those 100 people, what did they talk about, how many of them do you know, did they have a good time at the party, etc.

If we carry this example a little deeper and use a store as the analogy instead of a party all of a sudden you really start caring a lot of what they are saying and doing.

Harvest fills in those gaps for Community Server customers.

Version 1 provided the basics. In version 2 we’re adding some incredible new capabilities such as forecasting and sentiment.

Forecasting helps predict where things are headed. For example, based on data from a date range you could forecast whether you can expect an increase or decrease in support questions in your community. If you are a large Enterprise organization deploying Community Server, such as Dell, and you want to lower 1:1 call volume and send more traffic to your 1:many support community, then seeing a forecast that trends may be viewed positively. More importantly forecasting can help the organization better plan the resources required to support the community.

What I’m most excited about in Harvest 2.0 though is sentiment.

Companies spend billions of dollars a year to get a better understanding of how customers perceive their products or services. While surveys clearly have a lot of value, not all users participate. Communities, as described in the WSJ article referenced above, contain an invaluable trove of data about customers perceptions, actions, and more. Harvest’s new sentiment engine scans all Community Server content as well as external content through RSS against words or phrases and visually maps out perceptions.

This is incredibly powerful. By better understanding what customers think, you can make much better decisions.

I’ll post more details about Harvest 2.0 in the coming weeks, if you are interested in learning more now don’t hesitate to drop me a note: rhoward@telligent.com

We’re putting the final touches on the Community Server 2008 Fall Release – officially this is Community Server 2008.5. 

One of the new additions I’m excited about is the inclusion of a Wiki. Wikis are available as both a stand-alone solution, similar to blogs, and are also fully integrated into Community Server groups.

I wanted to share some of the details about our Wiki solution:

1. Rich Editor – Instead of requiring you to know wiki-syntax, such as what is found in media wiki, we chose to make our wiki solution simple and approachable for the every day user. We included support for our rich editor so all of the styling, images, etc. can be done without needing to know wiki syntax.

2. Support for basic Wiki Syntax –  While using the rich editor does make our wiki simpler, we still wanted to support wiki syntax where it makes sense. For example, if you are authoring a document you can use [[my new page]] to create a link to a new page. We also support piping and category options as well. For example:

[[community server wiki|Wiki Overview]]

3. Tab based UI – wiki content is broken up into 4 tabs: Article – the published version; Edit – edit the current version; Comments – list of comments; History – content history with comparison ability:

4. Structure – our wiki does support unstructured content, but also fully supports structured content where articles are children of parent pages. There is an infinite amount of nesting which allows you to replicate whatever structure you want within your wiki:

5. Permissions and Moderation – permissions and moderation tools provide community owners with capability to control content when needed.

6. Email notifications and RSS –  wikis support subscriptions via email – so you can be notified when a wiki you are following is updated – and you can also subscribe through RSS.

7. Social Voting – we’ve also added some social voting tools to help rank or show the value of different pages. The idea of course is to help important content get bubbled up:

The new wiki is also fully integrated with Harvest Report so you can pull out meaningful business intelligence around your wiki. I’ll post some details about some of the updates we’ve made to Harvest in the coming weeks as well.

Last night we published some details about the roadmap for Community Server.

We’re also beginning to trickle out some details about our Evolution line; Community Server with some great enhancements for the Intranet:

• Native integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• Native integration with Microsoft Active Directory for sign-on and profile
• Integration with Microsoft Exchange Server for distribution list management and data retention

With the Evolution release we will also include a Wiki as a new Community Server capability.

Ben McConnell, author of several books including Citizen Marketers, and I are putting together a webinar about online communities. Below are the details: