Social Collaboration For Dummies

Chapter 11

Standards for Social Networking and Integration

In This Chapter

Surviving shifting standards

Leveraging common web standards

Exploring the OpenSocial enterprise standard for app embedding

Calculating the odds for social software standards

There is a lot to love about the idea that an organization should have one integrated social platform for all its communication and collaboration needs. At the same time, one software product, or software vendor, or cloud service, probably cannot fulfill every business need, now and forever.

So, using multiple products implies the need for standards — or at least commonly accepted specifications, data formats, and protocols — for plugging applications into each other and sharing context. Otherwise, you will tend to wind up with not one collaboration network but dozens of them. In this chapter, I help you think through the difficulties of dealing with shifting standards, enumerate the different types of standards, and consider the viability of one in particular, OpenSocial.

Surviving Shifting Standards

The social software industry is ...