LepoLand - A Blog by Alan Lepofsky

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee gave a keynote titled "The Social Layer."  I'll link to the slides below, but the general idea is that application silos create walled communities, the exact thing we're trying to avoid with social software.   You don't want your HR, Sales, Marketing and Engineering teams only talking to each other, yet that is exactly what happens if you add social tools to each standalone enterprise application.  Instead, you want communication to happen transparently so that more people can participate in and benefit from the conversations.


Photo credit: Ricky Romero

By making social a layer, we (the vendors) can create solutions that bridge the gap between islands of applications, allowing you (the customers) to work in a far more efficient and effective way.   We're (the industry) just starting to make this happen, but I hope that by working together we can avoid the integration issues that have plagued enterprise applications for decades.  In my next post I'll discuss the standards that are being put in place to make this vision a reality, and how we're using them to develop Socialtext Connect.