This website is a resource to help you find the social software tool that fits best your company’s needs.
We believe that merely comparing features is the wrong approach towards selecting enterprise social software and this is why we compare the major products by evaluating them in a set of relevant business use cases, technological product dimensions and vendor qualities. Each rating is explained with a short evaluation text and screenshots give an impressions about how it is to actually use the tools. We will continuously extend the list of tools covered with a focus on solutions that are capable to act as a companywide internal or external social collaboration platform for medium and large sized enterprises. In addtion we will publish updates about social software tools as well as Enterprise 2.0 related articles translated from our German blog besser20.de. Thank you for helping us to improve the matrix by giving us your feedback either personally or directly by commenting on the pages! An introduction to the website can be found here. We are happy about retweets!

We are happy to announce a partnership with The 2.0 Adoption Council.

This partnership is a great step as it combines the approach of comparing
social software in business relevant categories with a group of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners. In fact this can be considered a paradigm shift as the partnership marks the first attempt to assess social software from a purely practitioner-based perspective, unbiased by vendor or consultancy influence and interests.

The first project of our partnership is an assessment of the tools used by the members of the 2.0 Adoption Council. Therefore, we have set up a members area where council members can log-in and evaluate the tools they use (see “2.0 Adoption Council” in the top navigation). We are excited about this project, and though we have to keep access to the evaluation process limited to the members of the 2.0 Adoption Council to keep results unbiased, we are happy to share our insights with the E2.0 community at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston

If you are an Enterprise 2.0 practitioner and work for a large company you can contact Susan Scrupski, the founder of the 2.0 Adoption Council, to join the council and get the opportunity to participate in filling out the “council-matrix” here on socialsoftwarematrix.org.

A major part of our Social Media perception is the direct result of our experiences with our own Social Intranet. It is based on Atlassian’s enterprise wiki Confluence and internally known as the “Teamweb”.  The Teamweb is now a little more than one year old and with some delay to the celebrations I want to describe our experiences and insights from this year.

T-Systems Multimedia Solutions has more than 700 employees at 8 locations in Germany. Our old intranet is a CMS system on the basis of Vignette with a SharePoint Platform (MOSS 2007) for project collaboration within the company as well as customer integrated collaboration. As said before our new social Intranet is based on Confluence, which we have upgraded to version 3.1 recently. The old intranet is still up and running parallel to the new system but will be shut down in near future.

An average month in numbers:

• 381 comments
• 1.413 pages
• 6.951 edited pages
• 87.155 page views

This year we have received the award “excellent knowledge organization” from the German ministry of economics and technology for our social intranet and especially for our use case of the intranet based companywide strategy development process. The award is a nice acknowledgement but at the end of the day the question that matters is:

What were the benefits? More…

After a month of testing and reviewing MindTouch 2009 Enterprise we have now published our results and officially added it to the Social Software Matrix.

MindTouch is a very interesting social software solution which differentiates itself from competing products. In contrast to most other social software vendors which focus on increased pre-packaging and more out of the box functionality, the strategy of MindTouch is to enhance their wiki-based collaboration platform as an integration point of existing enterprise applications and the related information silos. The platform has a web-oriented architecture and operates on clean XHTML to provide the best integration conditions. Instead of reinventing the wheel by providing all social software functionality out of the box, MindTouch enables customers to integrate specialized social software (i.e. for blogs: Wordpress) on the platform and extend its’ capabilities with other web-services. In addition to that the Deki script language allows users to create powerful templates and data-mashups.

As these aspects show, MindTouch is designed to be highly customized and extended so the high rating in this category is no surprise. For the use-cases however, it was hard to decide for the appropriate rating because we had to find the right value in a wide range from the (rather weak) out of the box status to a possible implementation that would leverage the good MindTouch infrastructure (being fully customized, integrated and extended with other software and web-services).

Finally we concluded that in order to be fair we had to stay closer to what MindTouch offers itself (out of the box) and not in combination with other specialized social software like Wordpress or vBulletin. Like with all other tools our ratings have to be understood as indicators for strengths and weaknesses of a product not as scientific facts. The MindTouch page gives a good overview about the platform and the product is a valuable add-on for the Social Software Matrix. Please let us know what you think about it and what experiences you have made with the tool.

Today, on the 11th of November, we have released Socialsoftwarematrix.org in beta status. The website gives visitors an overview about the enterprise social software market by comparing leading products in a set of business use cases, technological product dimensions and vendor qualities. The results we present here are based on our in depths testing of the tools, social software project experience and enterprise social software case-reviews. Nevertheless, results are not scientifically objective but reflect our personal perception of the tools which we would like to sharpen in the discussion with you on this blog and under the individual toolpages which are linked here and in the sidebar.

To make our evaluation transparent we have outlined our categories in a few bullet points and written individual evaluation texts for each tool. Socialsoftwarematrix.org is designed to serve visitors with different expectations. For all who want a quick overview about social software products we designed the SSM-flash-widget which can be easily embedded into blogs and websites. People who want to directly compare tools can use the dynamic comparison feature in the sidebar and everybody who wants more detailed information about a special tool should read the evaluation texts on the toolpages. So take a look around, tell us what you think and join the matrix!