Categories

All tools in the Social Software Matrix have been compared in business use case-, technological- and product categories. A description of all categories is given in the tables below. A summarizing sentence is complemented by a list of crucial features. These descriptions state the most important features that are expected in the different categories from good Social Software Suites. The description are not meant to be strict definitions of the categories but shall give the reader an idea of what each category means and what has been taken into consideration during the evaluation process.

Use Cases

Technology and Product

Use Cases

back	Enterprise Communication is about using social software as a communication platform on which every employee can participate in enterprise discussions across traditional company boundaries. Discussions can be initiated top-down as well as bottom-up and be conducted on a small level or across the enterprise. Enterprise Communication includes: forum functionality and blogs comments and rating for all content option to restrict functionality (read, write, comment) for more official spaces moderation and to abuse reporting setting up of brand official and non official spaces
back	Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange is about enabling people to collaborate on and across all levels of an organization with: flexible configuration of open and closed workspaces within a hierarchical structure a broad range of social software functionality (e.g. wiki-pages, blogs, bookmark-sharing, microblogs, discussion forums) within a workspace flexible workspace configuration (individual selection of functionality) option to restrict access on multiple levels to protect sensitive information file sharing and document management (versions, WebDAV access, pdf/word export) tag clouds for discovery of knowledge Advanced: Office integration and desktop/explorer connector for file handling
back	The goal is to support employees in maintaining and expanding their corporate network, based on a virtual representation of all users (in profiles), including their contact data, skills, expertise and interests to: connect with colleagues and follow their activities locate experts for any topic with a keyword search (Advanced: extra people search) give access to a user’s activities on the platform and related content on each profile (aggregated user profile) consider the content produced by/related to a person (search function) in order to reflect the development of expertise, to provide currency and relevance of result Advanced: visualize relationships and/or users in an organizational hierarchy
back	The goal is to provide employees with the ability to select information sources and integrate them on a central and customizable personal page: personal space and dashboard with option to integrate RSS feeds and widgets personal blogs and wiki-subspaces serving as virtual notebooks bookmark management advanced search function searching across workspaces and content types
back	Projects are a special form of enterprise collaboration and need dedicated support functionality which can be provided by social software, including: a collaboration workspace with advanced file management (see chapter Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange) coordinated centralized communications with project blogs, wikis and microblogging functionality resource planning and tracking of project progress with a central task list, milestones and project calendar Advanced: Time tracking, requirements management and detailed task coordination, including workflows

Technology and Product

back	Operational Flexibility deals with the question of how flexible a social software product is in terms of set up and integration under the different conditions companies have: offered as software as a service (SaaS), as an on premise solutions or both flexibility of databases and servers (operating system) scalability and clustering support compliance with standards integration capabilities with- or dependence on other software accessibility (e.g. mobile access) multi language support
back	Customization & Extensibility takes into account the ease of customization of the product on a general as well as on a personal level. Furthermore it deals with the question in which ways basic capabilities can be extended: design adjustments to match corporate design change of navigation and layout user managed personalization with widgets availability and quality of plug-ins, development framework, Application Programming Interface (API), compliance with REST/SOAP as well as existence and activity of a developer community around the product
back	A heavy used social software platform quickly becomes as business critical as established enterprise applications and thus requires advanced data management and security support functions: security and access control for users backup and recovery lifecycle management for data and archiving Single Sign On (SSO) and LDAP integration possibilities good granularity in access control and management
back	The main focus is on the capabilities of the vendor and its ability and vision to further develop the product: current market position, market development and financial situation good strategy with clear objectives - company size, growth rate number of developers working on the product frequency and quality of new releases reference projects, number and size of installed and running versions
back	Support and Service depends, besides direct vendor support and product documentation, mainly on the product partner channel: number of integrators, consultancies and resellers supporting companies in implementing and managing of the social software product broad community support - not only for open source projects vendor support quality and availability (e.g. 24/7 hotline) whitepapers on best practices and product training product maintenance: new patches and release