Social Business Software

Customizing Commons

Customizing Commons

Drupal Commons off-the-shelf is a ready-to-use, open source solution for building social business community sites. Without any customization, individuals can easily create communities for collaboration and corporate communication, or they can create communities for targeted audiences like developers and customer support teams.

Proprietary Social Business Software and Its Dirty Little Secrets

Posted on Fri, Feb 04, 2011 17:03 by tim.bertrand
tim.bertrand's picture

I love it when, for the third time in the past week, we get off the phone with a customer of our Social Business Software (SBS) competitor, Jive Software, and we hear that they are playing the same games that Enterprise software companies have played for the last thirty years:

- Everything is a "customization"
- Customizations cost lots of money
- Organizations need to rely on the company or its partners to perform customizations

Assembling Extraordinary External Community Sites

Posted on Fri, Jan 21, 2011 10:07 by Tom Erickson
Tom Erickson's picture

I was recently asked to speak to a group of CTOs in Europe and the USA about social business tools. Designed as an information session, the organizers asked Acquia to present how an open source platform like Drupal could be used to build effective community sites as well as delivering other types of web applications, from e-commerce sites to marketing microsites. The other company asked to present focuses exclusively on a social business solution, requiring the use of other products for different applications.

Drupal - Have it YOUR Way (Or, the Constraints of Social Business Software)

Posted on Fri, Nov 12, 2010 14:51 by tim.bertrand
tim.bertrand's picture

One of the most common complaints that we hear from our prospects & customers when in the market for Community Software and/or Social Business Software is that the licensing models of the proprietary vendors are very inflexible. They often end up charging their customers on a per user basis, annually, - and on top of that, bundle in typical proprietary software maintenance costs.

Join the Social Business Revolution

Posted on Tue, Nov 02, 2010 16:52 by Tom Erickson
Tom Erickson's picture

The social web is dramatically changing the way we work and play. Organizations are gaining substantial productivity improvements from what the inventor of the term web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly, describes as “harnessing the collective intelligence.”

Social business software gets common

Posted on Mon, Oct 25, 2010 16:44 by jay
jay's picture

A few of days ago I blogged about a conversation I had with an industry analyst. A key quote I heard from him that conversation was this: "The feature set for social business software is now pretty well known." And again today I heard from another well-known social business software consultant that he thinks "There's not much IP (intellectual property) in social business software; it's not hard software to create."

If I were an analyst today (I was one at Forrester in the mid 1990's), I'd say it's time to write a complete report about what this means for enterprises.

What it means is that organizations should be cautious about buying into expensive proprietary solutions, since those products - and companies - are now highly vulnerable to being commoditized.

Drupal Commons isn't dependent on using Drupal

Posted on Fri, Oct 08, 2010 15:19 by jay
jay's picture

Ok, so yes - the title is a bit misleading in one sense; but in another it's totally true. Let me explain.

While briefing an industry analyst yesterday, I realized that the analyst was presuming that an organization needed to have adopted Drupal in some way before they would could use Drupal Commons. This is not the case.

The "New" New Way to Innovate on McKinsey's Technology Trends

Posted on Mon, Aug 16, 2010 11:09 by Tom Erickson
Tom Erickson's picture

McKinsey’s latest quarterly includes an updated list of top technology trends to watch. The list was first published over two years ago and described eight tech-business trends that were reshaping strategy across industries. Since then, the social web has exploded, creating a quandary for executives on “how to help their companies capitalize on the transformation under way.”

Roadmap, or Roadblock?

Posted on Fri, Aug 06, 2010 13:09 by jay
jay's picture

I continually marvel at how much better the open source world works than the old proprietary software software world.

Yesterday I encountered an amazingly good illustration. I was discussing Drupal Commons with a team from a large, household-name enterprise that is planning a social business site. And boy, they had lots of questions!

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Gartner, Inc. names Drupal-Acquia “Visionary” for Externally Facing Social Software & Social Software in the Workplace
Gartner, Inc

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