You can't attend a conference or webinar these days without hearing how social, location, mobile, gamification, cloud and big data are currently the most influential trends in enterprise software. Of these, location is currently getting the least amount of attention, but that may be changing soon. Take for example Tibco, who have just announced some location features to their Tibbr product.
So what role should location play in enterprise software? I think the best way to answer that is to start by saying what I don't want it to be... "FourSquare for the Enterprise." I can't see companies wanting employees to compete over being Leader of the Lunchroom or Ruler of the Water Cooler. However, I do think a great deal of value could be derived from adding location as a layer of metadata stored with objects that are part of a business processes. Those objects could be things like people, customer records, inventory, steps in a workflow, status updates, etc.
If location was stored with objects, that data could then be used to filter information, just like how facets such as time and author are used today. This could lead to location-specific activity streams, similar to how Google+ provides a "Nearby" stream in their mobile apps. Location is not just reserved for people though. Say a new customer prospect was entered into your CRM system and that record was broadcast into your activity stream along with the customer's location. If an employee was subscribed to updates based on that location, they may be able to help close the deal.
In other words, location is an important data point that could be used to reduce the rapidly increasing amount of information that is being pushed into activity streams.
Another way location could help is to assist employees as they travel. Imagine visiting a customer location or remote office and having your social software automatically provide you information about the facility such as where to park, maps to the visitor center, places to eat and a list of local colleagues you're connected with (or others like you that are visiting) all based on knowing your location. Take it a step further and imagine if the system automatically informed your people working there that you were visiting and they could reach out to you to try and meetup.
There are many ways in which location can play a pivotal role in helping navigate the sea of information we're all drowning in. Based on conversations I've had with several vendors I know we're going to see a lot of advancements in this area. If you're a software vendor and you're not working on this already, you better start as you're already way behind.
Integration Maturity Model
Tue, May 1st 2012 5:10p Alan Lepofsky One of the hottest topics in social software is integration, with each vendor hyping up how they can can integrate with, or integrate into various other systems. To help position the degree of functionality and richness of each vendor's solution I've created the following integration maturity model. Level 1 = Ok: At the most rudimentary level, the vendor's platform enables events from other products to be broadcast into their activity stream, shown on pages, or similar. For exa [read] Keywords: application
email
integration
networking
profile
sharepoint
social software
It’s Not About File Sharing. It’s About Getting Work Done.
Wed, Apr 25th 2012 10:31a Alan Lepofsky Today Box announced several enhancements to their platform and partner ecosystem, including: 15 new Box OneCloud apps Version 2 of their API Instant Mode: Enables developers to create Box accounts that link to their applications Box OneCloud App to App Framework: a set of tools that makes it much easier for mobile app developers to tie their app into Box OneCloud Partnerships with New York based General Assembly and TechStars, who will be providing mentorship and assistance to early stage tech [read] Keywords: application
applications
google
integration
mobile
network
149
It’s Not About File Sharing. It’s About Getting Work Done.
Wed, Apr 25th 2012 9:20a Alan Lepofsky Today Box announced several enhancements to their platform and partner ecosystem, including: 15 new Box OneCloud apps Version 2 of their API Instant Mode: Enables developers to create Box accounts that link to their applications Box OneCloud App to App Framework: a set of tools that makes it much easier for mobile app developers to tie their app into Box OneCloud Partnerships with New York based General Assembly and TechStars, who will be providing mentorship and assistance to early stage tech [read] Keywords: application
applications
google
integration
mobile
network
156
Yammer Is Now More Dynamic
Tue, Apr 24th 2012 9:51a Alan Lepofsky Today Yammer announced several new partner integrations, including Microsoft Dynamics. The MS Dynamics integration allows CRM related events such as new opportunities or updates to account records to be broadcast into the Yammer activity stream enabling people to discover and discuss the event. In addition to the CRM announcement, Yammer also added several HR partners including UpMo, Perks, Ultimate Software and Subscribe-HR ; customer service vendor UserVoice ; project management vendors Affini [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
desktop
email
enterprise
facebook
integration
linkedin
microsoft
mobile
profile
social software
186
Email Is The Life Preserver That Keeps Me From Drowning In Information
Sun, Apr 22nd 2012 9:40p Alan Lepofsky The amount of information generated in the blogs, wikis, video & photo sites plus the multiple social networks I am part of, is too much to keep up with manually. Thankfully email is here to help keep me up to date with what's going on. Yes, you read that correctly. Email helps me manage information overload. In Mac's mail.app I've created a Smart Mailbox that displays the daily digests generated by several of the internal and external tools that I use and web sites that I'm a member [read] Keywords: apple
email
facebook
google
mac
mobile
twitter
141
Will Google Drive Tie Together Their Collaboration Portfolio?
Tue, Apr 17th 2012 6:10a Alan Lepofsky A great deal of excitement is brewing over the imminent release of Google's file sharing/synchronization service, rumoured to be named Google Drive which may be launching next week. This new service will have to compete with several existing services such as Box and Dropbox, but could integration with other components of Google's collaboration infrastructure be its secret weapon? I'm curious to see if this new service will just be a simple cloud storage solution, or if there will be built [read] Keywords: collaboration
applications
email
google
integration
office
173
File Share and Synchronization Services
Thu, Apr 12th 2012 7:41p Alan Lepofsky List of products: Box Citrix ShareFile Cubby DropBox Egnyte FileTrek GroupLogic ActivEcho Microsoft SkyDrive (Windows Live Mesh) Soonr SkyDox SugarSync Wuala YouSendIt Questions to ask: What clients are supported: Windows? Mac? Web? iPhone? iPad? Android? What other products/tools/services is it integrated with? Is there an app store? How much (free) storage is offered? What is the max file size? Do synched files have to be in a specific directory, or anywhere? Are there [read] Keywords: collaboration
citrix
community
enterprise
iphone
mac
microsoft
security
