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Part II: Putting SIM into Action
Picking Social Software for Social Influence A myriad range of social software companies provides solutions for businesses. These vary from software as a service (SaaS) solutions that you can rent for a few dollars per month to enterprise-grade solutions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and have been retooled for the social world. It can be confusing, finding the right solution for your company as you create an environment that energizes employees for social influence, but here are the four classes of software and Web solutions to consider.
Enterprise software If you belong to a large organization, you probably don’t control what software you get to use. In these instances, you should try to influence your IT department to buy emergent social software or enterprise software upgrades that include social functionality that can either be plugged into your enterprise environment or run independently. ✓ Microsoft SharePoint (http://sharepoint.micro soft.com; see Figure 5-1) is probably the most popular collaboration software in companies today and integrates with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products very easily. ✓ SAP (www.sap.com) is deployed across large enterprises as it handles industrial grade business operations, customer management, financial, and HR needs very well. ✓ IBM (www.ibm.com) with its Web sphere portal is another great option; it’s easy to build custom applications on it that can be delivered through a portal environment. ✓ Telligent (http://telligent.com) is known for its rich community functionality (its Community server product) and how it integrates with the rest of a company’s IT infrastructure. Every day, these enterprise-grade collaboration platforms add more social features to their application suites. Most have Web-based interfaces, too.
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