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Comment by romanovcode | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean: "Enterprise social network"?

I can tell you what it means to us at Fogbeam: It's just a Social Network that is tailored to included features that make it specifically useful inside an enterprise, as a way of sharing information / links / knowledge / whatever.

In our opinion, what distinguishes an "enterprise" social network from a "non enterprise" social network are things like:

1. LDAP/Active Directory support

2. Programmatic provisioning with an API

3. Support for integration with other enterprise applications via standard protocols. iCal / CalDAV for integration with calendaring servers / groupware, for example.

4. Etc.

it means that the network is meant to be used inside a company, to our developer team/systems analysts/testers interact about things that have to do with our work

like sharing an interesting link, a new library, sharing nice solutions, writing an article about how to use some new stuff on primefaces for example and so on

"Enterprise" can mean a lot of things, but I would expect: support for LDAP authentication and paid on-call technical support at a minimum. This project doesn't look "Enterprise" to me (yet).

Probably something like Yammer, but for your own intranet.

yup!

So, none of the features that mindcrime mentioned upthread?

To be fair, our definition isn't necessarily the definition either. And there are degrees of "enterpriseyness*. We, at Fogbeam, try to distinguish products by really emphasizing the integration aspect. But a tool without all those features could absolutely still be a useful tool, depending on the situation.

We're angling towards really large organizations with our offering - the kinds of companies that are using BPM / Workflow engines, a SOA architecture, LDAP/AD, etc. But many firms, especially smaller ones, might not want or need those integrations.

#1 and #3 came to mind for me immediately, even before I read your comment. Although SSO integration is displacing LDAP/AD.

And smaller firms generally view 'Enterprise' solutions as bloated consulting-ware, so if that's their market, they need to work on their messaging.

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