Chapter 8

Beginning Your Search for a Social Collaboration Platform

In This Chapter

arrow Dealing with a crowded market

arrow Knowing what you need

arrow Categorizing vendor types

arrow Deciding between lightweight tools and comprehensive platforms

arrow Evaluating trade-offs

Technology alone will not make an online community successful or improve the quality of the collaboration between employees within a company. Success depends upon strong leadership and day-to-day management of the social community, combined with an accumulation of success stories that encourage more experimentation and more success. Making the right platform choice doesn’t guarantee any of those things; however, the wrong platform choice will undercut the best leadership. For example, if the system that employees are encouraged to use proves unreliable or frustrating to use, it will fail to deliver on the leader’s promise of a tool for improved productivity.

“Picking right” isn’t as simple as choosing the market leader or the product with ...

Get Social Collaboration For Dummies now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.