Given that most people have become more than familiar with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and that they use these to communicate with business associates, friends and family, it is important for enterprises to invest in a product that helps employees communicate with each other and in groups for the purpose of improved productivity and collaborative efforts. There are several products available in the market like Jive, Yammer and TIBBR. While each product has its advantages in this post I will be focussing on the use of TIBBR.
Communication between employees and within teams on Projects is usally through email. This is so 20th century! Using a product like TIBBR you can see an increase in productivity through increased collaboration within the organization.
TIBBR 3.0 is significant upgrade and a product of TIBCO, a company regarded highly in Wall Street. It is easy to get started with TIBBR in your enterprise. You can start small by using it for a few users in a single group and then extending its reach. It is available in the Cloud but can also be installed locally in your own servers. TIBBR licenses are available based on number of users on per month or annual basis. Prices are affordable in the range of tens of dollars per user per month with no installations and all activity on the cloud. To meet your company's data governance and privacy policies TIBBR offers on-premise option as well.
The user experience is similar to Facebook and the learning curve to become productive using the product is non-existent for users of Facebook. This could drive adoption in your company significantly which usually is a problem with implementation of new software platforms in the enterprise. You can follow other employees in your company. It provides all the standard features that you would expect of a social networking site. More importantly it provides other ways of interfacing with enterprise applications.
TIBBR allows you to check your Facebook Newsfeeds and post to your Facebook wall right from inside of the TIBBR interface. This can be set up very quickly and easily through a couple of clicks.
TIBBR provides collaboration in the enterprise in the flow of work and integrates with enterprise systems like Oracle ERP or SAP etc. Without having to leave the TIBBR interface users have the ability to interact with business processes in any enterise app using TIBBRs simple but solid integration framework. For example, you can build a social layer on top of Microsoft Sharepoint making it easy for teams to collaborate and share documents. Valuable content hidden in SharePoint folders can be exposed to other team member more effectively.
TIBBR has native apps for most smartphones like iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and also iPAD Tablets. Thus users can access their accounts and relevant data streamed from different enterprise applications integrated with TIBBR from the convenience of their device of choice.
TIBBR also allows you to check your Twitter feed, send out Tweets right from inside of the TIBBR interface. This can be set up very quickly and easily through a couple of clicks.
TIBBR has the ability to initiate and conduct Video Conferences and also screen share.
TIBBR has aan easy way of adding RSS feeds as well.
TIBBR has the ability to extract data from CRM, ERP and other transactional systems and allow actions based on the data from inside TIBBR.
From Oracle ERP, you could send out an alert to your purchase department every time an item in your inventory falls below the reorder level and initiate the stock replenishment process from inside tibbr. Approval processes for authorizing transactions in SAP requiring your initials can also be initiated from inside tibbr. In Salesforce.com, you could publish key events such as a new lead generated, and empower people from outside your sales team to give input on how you might win that account.
You should consider using TIBBR or a similar product in your organization, but TIBBR may the easiset to set up and have a high adoption in the enterprise.
Please note that I DO NOT HAVE ANY AFFILIATION WITH TIBCO and only have been a user of their products in the past and I am not soliciting for them.