Sunday, May 14, 2006

Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

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Wikipedia- defines Social bookmarking as a web based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. The entry on Wikipedia provides a good overview including advantages and disadvantages and a comprehensive list of bookmarking services.

I am very interested in how the concept of social bookmarking within enterprises is going to affect collective knowledge sharing. I think that official enterprise sponsored bookmarking services have been slow to pick up due to the fear of a loss of standards with enterprise and privacy issues. Bookmarking services typically are free web-based services and the behind the fire-wall requirements for most enterprise applications has probably slowed down enterprise wide adoption.

I was pushed this paper on how The MITRE Corporation is piloting the use of Social Bookmarking on a Corpora
te Iintranet (it came from one of my listserv subscriptions -from the The Information Architecture Institute) . Now MITRE is not a typical corporate enterprise they are a not-for-profit organization chartered to work in the public interest through federal funding mostly- but the paper points to the benefits of an enterprise wide system for social bookmarking tools. I hope this group continues to present their findings as they move out of pilot.

Searching a bit more i also found this ACM article on Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise
on the internal IBM Dogear project.

From a Research and Develpment perspective the benefits of such tools is highly apparent. Of particular interest to me is how Sales Organizations could benefit from social bookmarking tools. As sales teams browse the web, internal corporate sites, subscription services and even internal applications ( e.g. web based CRMs)- they should be able to quickly bookmark the web based content-tag it to specific clients and projects and have those bookmarks automatically available to other team members who are working on that account- perhaps through RSS feeds. I am having very interesting conversation with customers about this concept and hopefully will have more to share soon.


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