Enterprise Social Networks

There is no doubt that with the growing trend in the usage of Social Networks in the consumer space strongly suggests that they are here to stay. The benefits of the networks as an enabler of online social interactions can be derived to add social intelligence in enterprise context. Such networks will also facilitate the transformation of organizational structure from traditional hierarchies into networked hierarchies. In this post I will walk through some of the technology options that are available out there for building Enterprise Social Portals/Networks:

Apache Shindig:

Apache Shindig is a Reference Implementation for OpenSocial specification. With this you can expose your existing Social Graph and it acts as a container for OpenSocial widgets.

SocialSite:

SocialSite is an open source initiative from Sun Microsystems providing a complete end-to-end user interface and an API for social networking. It supports widgets by providing an OpenSocial container by leveraging Apache Shindig in its architecture.

RingSide Networks:

RingSide Networks is an open source offering that enables any website with social networking capabilities by providing implementation for both Facebook and OpenSocial specifications. RingSide acts as a powerful container hosting social information and as a bridge to Facebook social information platform hence providing interoperability. The only issue with this is its still in Beta.

Liferay:

Liferay is also an open source offering which provides both enterprise portal and social collaboration platform software. The solutions provide components for Web 2.0 features like Blogs, Wiki, Calendar, etc. It also provides a way to host social graph and promises OpenSocial Apache Shindig integration.