Industry analysts have been trying to sort the differences between collaboration software, employee social networks and intranets for the last seven or eight years. Good news! They are starting to come around to our point of view that these are all, of necessity, part of a whole. The distinctions between them are less important than having a whole system that can address employee communications, the need to share information in libraries, the need for employees to share informal updates, and the need to enable team communications.
Tom Petrocelli, Research Director for Enterprise Social, Mobile, and Cloud Applications at Neuralytix, puts it this way:
At the heart of it, social collaboration has always been about more effective communication and sharing of information. In the past, the feature sets were more distinct between categories such as online file sharing and enterprise social networks.
He gave Jostle high marks for surfacing information. He notes Jostle’s unique ability to show relevant information based on the user’s groups, teams and divisions. He also mentions that our customers report higher than average usage and engagement. Jostle’s median customer employee engagement is 85% of staff participating monthly.
There is one point of healthy disagreement. Neuralytix favors small deployments that grow. Jostle finds that whole company deployments, properly orchestrated according to our deployment process, can rapidly build very impressive engagement.
Also mentioned in the report are Salesforce Chatter, Jive, IBM Connections, Mumba Cloud, SAP, Bloomfire and Oracle Social Connections.
If you’re curious about the convergence of internal communications tools, you may find Tom’s report helpful. Download the free report here.
