Why us dinosaurs may soon be left in the dark

It's a sad day when business social media pioneers cannot bring themselves to reply to an email

A couple of weeks ago I attended the UK launch of Tibco’s enterprise social networking tool Tibbr, and although I was expecting a kind of business Facebook, it surprised me on two counts.

First, the extra functions. Having so-called event streams which could be “followed”, rather than just people, à la Facebook, looks like a winner. Tying into enterprise applications such as SAP CRM, and allowing them to automatically message your “wall” is also a good idea, as is integrating Facebook and Twitter.

The second surprise was the functions that were left out. It was only the first release, but there was no integration with unified communication tools – for example, I couldn’t see any Skype numbers or links to unified comms systems.

Tibco has had Tibbr in beta for almost a year, so it should have ironed out the wrinkles, and integration with enterprise unified comms systems should have been included in the first release. At the event Tibco said such integration would be available in future releases.

So can enterprise social networking do for firms what Facebook has for consumers? If your employees are primarily mobile phone-centric, Tibbr is a shoo-in, providing execs are comfortable with the decision to move to a different type of working, focused on a much more collaborative approach.

Funnily enough, I decided to write a first look of Tibbr and had most of the copy written with about 10 questions outstanding, which I forwarded to Tibco so they could come back with some answers.

As I write this, five days later, I am still awaiting a reply. Perhaps Tibco’s techies are just too busy Tibbr-ing. Maybe they should have set up a “scratch” space for non-Tibco employees with a password that times out after a few days, on which I could have posted my questions, and then waited minutes for them to be answered – by the right Tibco employees.

Enterprise social networking will work, but it seems such a large cultural change to most firms’ way of working, that C-level execs thinking of rolling it out may take some time to be convinced.

And social networking dinosaurs such as myself? We’ll have long gone, with nimbler, more mobile creatures inheriting the enterprise. And unlike mammals’ domination of Earth, the timeline looks a lot less than 65 million years.

Dave Bailey is reviews editor at Computing