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Posts Tagged ‘Collaboration Engine’

U.S. Navy CIO: Social Media Should Be Part of Military IT Standard

In a blog post this week, U.S. Navy CIO Rob Carey wrote that social media is a resource for the American military that should be used to build trust and collaborate, both within and outside the organization.

In attempts to balance communication, transparency, and operational security, the military has encountered both practical obstacles and general criticism. In a recent podcast, Carey, he said, “Most social networking tools come with no rules of the road. As the Internet moves towards user-generated content, we thought there was a void we could fill… to mitigate some of the security risks associated with social media.”

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Beyond risk management, Carey said, “Social media has a powerful collaboration engine associated with it.”

Generally, military organizations have the options to reach out directly to large IT companies to configure customized security profiles and inherent OPSEC protection for personnel; traditionally, however, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have not been particularly receptive to working within that type of culture or framework. From the sharing-and-access social media pole to the security/military pole, both sides are resistant to different approaches to shared and social information. Still, Carey is an advocate for the usefulness of these tools, even behind a military firewall.

“We must remain a learning organization. As the Internet evolves, so must our workforce and its associated skills. To that end, we must be able to embrace change,” Carey wrote in his blog post. “Many of our processes are rooted in the Industrial Age and will need to move toward the Information Age to remain relevant in the coming years.”

With specific regard to social media and the American military, Carey stated, “Social media is an inherent part of the toolbox for members of the millennial workforce, while baby boomers are just adopting it. Social media tools should become the standard by which we can share and collaborate on information inside and outside the network boundaries.”

He also highlighted green initiatives, mobile working, and the use of modern technological tools in recruitment efforts.

To see the Carey’s office’s Policy and Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies, click here for a full PDF.

While Carey’s optimism is to be applauded, one wonders what our military-minded friends will have to say about OPSEC vis-a-vis social media. The battlefield isn’t really Foursquare-compatible, and the military might actually have the last plausible use case for censorship. Every servicemember is probably aware of existing regulations for Internet and social media use; how do you think Carey’s goals and statements will affect the state of affairs on the ground, and do you feel such a shift is needed or welcomed? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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cctext: Too Simple or a Smart Fit for The Small Business Market?

The wiki market space has transformed over the past few years with a number of the existing players adding social features to keep them competitive and more fully dimensional for users.

But we are starting to wonder how many wiki providers can play in the more established spaces of the market. Perhaps the best potential for emerging vendors is in the small business market, which is increasingly open to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments.

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cctext is a new wiki environment. It joins a number of more robust collaborative products that integrate wikis and social web technologies into their products. Perhaps there is an opening. Many of the first entrants to the market have moved up the ladder, due to their deeper product offering.

For instance, Socialtext started as a wiki provider and now offers social networking; social messaging; weblogs; dashboards and distributed spreadsheets. MindTouch calls itself an open-source collaboration engine for the enterprise and the web. PBWorks operates far deeper in the collaboration space as well. They recently introduced Social Collaboration Update, which in their words “includes social networking-style user profiles, Twitter-style microblogging, and the ability to create wiki pages (with file attachments) just by emailing a single email address.”

This trend is an example of how social applications are segmenting. As developers learn to add more pieces of information into their wiki products, they look more like content management systems than what we have traditionally called a wiki.

cctext, for its part, is a straight forward wiki that is counting on its speed and UI to give it a jump in the market.

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They may be on to something. Customers do complain about speed. A recent tweet about PBWorks expressed this pretty clearly:

cctext claims its speed comes from its cloud infrastructure. They use Amazon Web Services. We tested cctext and it does appear to be pretty fast when writing, editing and saving information. cctext allows for media uploads that play in the wiki. We uploaded a video. It worked fine but we could not view it. We used a test account so it may have been unviewable for that reason. Overall, cctext is a pretty clean experience. They have a pretty thorough list of features.

All in all, cctext is a wiki that truly is a wiki. It’s a basic tool for small business. Cost is $12 per month. First ten users are frree. cctext integrates with Google Apps. Pricing is the same for the Google Apps version.

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