Twitter in the enterprise

Last Updated (Friday, 31 July 2009 20:50) Tuesday, 23 June 2009 11:33

There's a lot of conversation about social media in the enterprise at the moment, whether it's a good or bad thing,  Craig Scroggies (VP at Symantec) article here is a good read. Like any web bases resource it's probably good in moderation as long as the main use is business related.

For example, if your sales people are on LinkedIn building their network and following that activity up with face to face meetings then I'd say that's a good use of social media. On the other hand you probably do want to be limiting FaceBook access to lunch times.

One part of the online social scene is micro-blogging, with Twitter leading the charge followed by similar sites like identi.ca and Jaiku.com. These service are born out the the 'what am I  doing now' idea that kicked off with instant messaging status messages.   

This creates an interesting compliance issue that is well understood and addressed by a myriad of solutions in the email world, how do you fit this micro-blogging activity into you company security and compliance policy?

I asked this question at Cleartext a year or so ago and we've been working ever since to bring a new SaaS platform to market that answers some of these questions. The end result is a platform that is part SaaS and part desktop (optional) that applies archiving to not only IM but micro-blogging services like Twitter and identi.ca.

This platform is targeted at two markets initially, the first being organisations that need to archive email and by extension IM, this now means the IT guy can give employees access to Twitter while recording the tweets in case they need to run a discovery process at a later date. This platform is being extended to encompass URL and malware filtering .

The second market is the power user that could be in any IT, marketing or media role and has multiple apps open to access many IM and micro-blogging services concurrently. This is where the desktop compoenent comes in, it acts as an end point for this messaging feed from the SaaS component.

So if you're serious about making the most out of social networking in business, particularly as it pertains to services like Twitter and you have compliance or data management component to your IT strategy then we can deliver a solution.