Here is another cross post from the FAST Forward blog that describes an approach to optimizing enterprise 2.0 connections and collaboration. There is always an element of social networking in social bookmarking, but Connectbeam makes this link explicit. They also provide a unique delivery vehicle as the service comes through a hardware application that stays behind the ftrewall. I recently discussed Connectbeam with its CEO, Puneet Gupta. He said, "Our fundamental belief is that social networking when it comes to businesses and enterprise, has to be front-ended with information access and discovery." Thus the networking begins around sharing information and social bookmarking comes into play. In addition to individual sharing, Connectbeam allows for group sharing through communities.

Connectbeam also wanted to take a novel approach to implementation to be more competitive with the large players entering this space. With a rapidly changing technology, the company did not want clients to have to deal with implementation concerns and face any issues with upgrades. They literally adopted a plug and play to get things not only inside the firewall but also inside the box, the one they provide. It also enables one click back up and restores, one click upgrades, and automatic authentication. Puneet said that a number of the very large enterprises that have adopted such as Honeywell, Intel, Nokia, CSC, and several of the big phrama have appreciated the security that the box offers.

One of the clients, Rich Hoeg at Honeywell, has written a bit on his Connectbeam experience on his blog, econtent. In his post, Tagging Inside the Firewall, Rich wrote, "the service and server are running inside our network domain, yet our employees will be able to tag both internal and external content...ConnectBeam works in tandem with our internal Google search appliance." Puneet believes that social networking and bookmarking have the potential to catch on quickly in the enterprise because they can easily intersect with existing work flow. Unlike Blogs and wikis, these applications can sit on top of applications that are already used within normal workflow like search. So they do not replace existing tools, they just sit on top.

Puneet did a search for me using the Google Search Appliance and Connectbeam provided additional ranking based on number of times tagged. It also offered related tags, related users, and related communities. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. This seems a nice extension, taking Google search even more into enterprise 2.0.