Enterprise Bookmarking: Tap the Power User

I just published an analysis of the enterprise bookmarking/tagging market. You can read it on EWeek here. I think I've hit everyone in the market, but if not drop me a line in the comments below and I'll add ém next time around.

My short take: Enterprise bookmarking is one cool technology that should help employees of already open, flat companies collaborate better and more effectively. Enterprise bookmarking and tagging though hinges on group collaboration, which requires enough individuals to achieve a network effort.  That means a large user base or or at least a small, but active user community, and all but requires removing the sorts of barriers you find in some financial institutions, for example. That's going to be a tough sell (more like a non-starter) in highly regulated industries.

But even in those organizations who aren't regulated or particularly hierarchical, getting user-participation will be a challenge to adoption.  Users don't bookmark or tag out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so because creating a log of important sites helps them. Only once that point is internalized will they feed an enterprise-wide bookmarking system.

What this says is that IT need to be exquisitely sensitive to the interface of these systems. "We're struggling with tagging even though there are some of us who think there's tremendous power [in the technology]," Clark Ritchie, director of Web development and information technology told me. Clark runs Jive Software's Clearspace, a tagging system, in his enterprise, which while not supporting bookmarking yet has similar human-interaction requirements. "We need the tooling to make it so stupidly easy that it takes off. "

Enterprise bookmarking systems are still far from making their systems so "stupidly easy" that they just take off. I list a number of the features in the story that are missing from today's systems, but suffice it say most have enough holes to make soliciting user participation a huge challenge. At the very least, users should be able to bookmark and tag site from the toolbar and not pop an additional screen to fill in the necessary details about a site.

Comments

[Anthony L.]

Hi Dave,

For your interest in social bookmarking,you should check out Vivisimo. It is building bookmarking, tagging and annotating services within its enterprise search platform. A new version of the platform will be released this fall.

[darrell king]

I recently implemented a php/mysql tagging and user feedback framework for use within our company (unfortunately, it hasn't gained much support). None the less, some important attributes of tagging frameworks surround the concept of domain_groups, specifically the configuration settings that can be associated with domain_groups (btw, a domain_group is merely a URL prefix). But since URLs are hierarchical in naturue, and since a company often has numerous organizations which operate atonomously, it is important for any public tagging and user feedback framework to allow heterogenius behavior so that organizations can be empowered to present forms and collect "template" based tags, surveys and feedback in the way that is most nature to them. And for such organizations that don't want to be obscured by tags offered by an entire company, they should be allowed to operate disparate databases while still leveraging enterprise wide tags and feedback when necessary. An optional configurable attribute known as "redirectURL" at the domain_group level allows this very benefit - of course, this implies that deriving of all configurable attributes matches a given URL against all URL prefixes up the domain_group chain, and then builds the attributes by using configuration settings using lowest domain_group (i.e., most specific). Obviously, usability issues are hugely important, but what seems to be missing in the social bookmarking discussion is how disparate organizations wihtin a company can figure out a way to "play nice" together. One size (i.e., one configuration) will never work for a large company. One example would be how survey feedback is collected - some organizations might want simple 5 star ratings based on N number of dimensions, while other organizations might want choice box drivin selections using user controlled values. Why not have both? Some of the other "search engine" type features which do automatic parsing and tag suggestion are great - so I really think a large search engine company is going to need to just figure out how to do this in a slick GUI, which an extendable and configurable database behind the scenes, then allow organizations to customize with their own URLs/scripts - and we'd be in good shape. I offer this information here in the hope that it will make its way to those offering tagging frameworks so that they start offering configurable attributes and flexibility at the domain_group level. And BTW, I realize that hierarchical nature of URL isn't always going to work (like when wikis use a non hierarchial id string - which would cause all content in a wiki to match against the same domain_group - but if the concept of leveraging URLs to imply some sort of organization (including URL parameters) was consistently recognized as a benefit, then everyone likely would benefit. Anyway, hope this finds its way to the right person.

[Sam Bressi]

I recently released a program called TagManage. Albeit three months late to have made the initial cut for your article.

If you get a moment, check it out! Thanks.