At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Internet Evolution sat down with Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext, a leader in enterprise social software. The company, which calls itself the "first Wiki company," is known for its wiki-centric software platform (also called Socialtext). We spoke with Lee about enterprise tools, their value, and which tools are wrong for the workplace.
At the conference, Socialtext also launched a new product, SocialCalc, which puts wiki capabilities inside a spreadsheet. SocialCalc, currently in private beta, was created in partnership with the Father of the Spreadsheet, Dan Brickland.
For other Enterprise 2.0 conference coverage, see:
Internet Evolution: Tell me about SocialCalc. What problem is this solving for the consumer market and for the enterprise?
Eugene Lee: What's different about this is we can now put the part of the spreadsheet relevant to you in your own workspace [and] the part that's relevant to me in my own workspace. As you make updates, there's a central place where the stuff can get included and linked to -- like in a wiki. It's really about intertwining wiki functionality with a spreadsheet. Also, in a spreadsheet, you can include wiki content: You can have wiki pages in it, links to RSS feeds, etc. So this is really about taking patterns of social behavior and adapting them for productivity inside of the corporation.
IE: What fundamental technological changes do you see happening right now in the enterprise?
Lee: On the vendor side I think there's a lot of people trying to chase the same target. Facebook is one of them. So, not to dis anybody by any means, but I think unless you have a deep understanding of the problem the enterprise is trying to solve, you completely miss the mark when you adopt that pattern. We believe the social network that's created by Facebook or LinkedIn is very powerful for personal use, to keep in touch with old friends -- I reconnected with a bunch of college friends on Facebook, it's great -- but the network is constructed through what I would call "explicit friending gestures." Are you my friend? If you say "yes," the rest of the world sees it -- but if you say "no," you might upset me.
In the corporate environment, whether we're friends or not is less relevant. We all work in the same company. What's more important is, what do you do? People should glean what your expertise is by what you've done. I think that's an example of what I mean by what's the depth of thinking about the problem the customer is trying to solve -- and what's relevant for use inside of the corporate world as opposed to, you know, hugs and kisses on Facebook -- and how you make those apps available inside of the enterprise.
There's also a lack of sensitivity in general about how important privacy and security is -- not just of the content but actually of the graph. We've chosen so far to support Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)'s OpenSocial standards because our dashboard is made of widgets that are made of Google Gadgets -- but we have not chosen the rest of it, which is about the sharing of your social networks. I'm not going to accidentally disclose the corporate directory of my customers to Facebook or to LinkedIn or to MySpace or to Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) or anyone else who joins it. The way the standards have been written so far is like they expect it [to be] a bilateral opening of the network -- which makes absolutely no sense.
IE: So now we have enterprise social networking tools, wikis, corporate blogs, a shift to the cloud... isn't all of this stuff going to take away productivity?
Lee: I think it can if it's done without a goal in mind. So, again, if it's about explicit ties and it's like who can amass the most links to the largest number of executives in the company, that's not very productive.
Just in the wiki environment... what we find the biggest payback on is implementations of projects that are in the flow of work, where you're actually doing the project collaboratively. We find in those cases it actually dramatically increases productivity. A couple of years ago the first thing a lot of people realized was it reduced email traffic, which is a big productivity drain with all the threads that go on forever. It's like, stop doing that, just have the conversation in the wiki and then everybody can see what everybody else said. When you look at social networking, if it's done with a goal of actually solving a problem, then it's less about who knows who and more about who knows what and who knows who knows what. And not like, OK... who went to school together and who's declared publicly that they'll hold hands.
IE: On that note, do you believe that we will see the end of email?
Lee: My short answer would be no. People predicted the demise of fax... radio. I do think in fact, when I talk about enabling group productivity within the flow of work, quite often we [Socialtext] have to recognize that we have to fit into stuff people use -- so we've made it very easy for people to email within a wiki. You can actually automatically create a wiki page by emailing to the wiki email address.
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