Tagging Inside the Firewall

My company is cool. In the last 24 hours we've brought online a pilot project which is one of the very first, if not the first, internal corporate social networking / tagging applications. By internal I mean the service and server are running inside our network domain, yet our employees will be able to tag both internal and external content. Although we are working with a company named ConnectBeam, you should also review other tagging solutions as complied by IT|Redux.

Okay, why is this cool? Well ... this application is inside our firewall and will allow our engineers to perform knowledge discovery, research and sharing across the miles ... even if they don't know each other! ConnectBeam works in tandem with our internal Google search appliance. Over the next few weeks we will conduct our final tests before rolling out our application later this Spring. Here are two screenshots that review some basic concepts:

1. Old style search
2. New style search

Click upon any thumbnail to enlarge (some of my prior posts on this topic)
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Comments

[John Casey]

Great Rich,
I was wondering why we didn't have some way to search within or own organization for experts in some of the programming areas, e.g., Word, Excel, Access, etc. This will be a good portal (or Blog, if you will) for that and similar exchanges.

[Joost Bekel]

Hi Rich, this looks really great! I am a strong advocate for the use of tag clouds. As a matter of fact, from an architectural point of view I'd like to introduce an Enterprise People Bus (EPB) to facilitate finding people to act in unstructured, turbulent processes (as opposed to an Enterprise Service Bus to support structured processes). (This is inspired by John Hagel's 'from push-to-pull'). And in this EPB there is a significant role for the tag cloud. To me your screenshots fit very well within this picture. Interesting insight, good luck!

[daniela barbosa]

Way Cool Richard and Congrats on being a leader in this space! I have no doubt that within a couple of months others will be looking at you for inspiration and advice so i look foraward to your continuing sharing of your experience of launching a social networking tool in your enteprise.

[Puneet Gupta]

Rich, you are to be congratulated for being a leader in placing the emphasis on its human capital as ways to advance, innovate, and lead in the market.
Companies that empower their knowledge and information workers via tools and application that help with collaboration, information and knowledge sharing and discovery will lead the 21st century ahead of competition with better quality products, quicker to market, and overall operational efficiencies.