Enterprise Social Network 2014 Update

2014 has been a year of change for enterprise social networks. The divisions between enterprise social networks and other collaboration software have become thin as features migrate between each type of product. Overall, enterprise social networks are as feature rich as ever, creating better user experiences.

Vendors have begun to add analytics capabilities in order to help surface the types of content these features create. In addition, new tools help end-users to create custom workspaces tailored to their teams’ needs.

Deployment strategies have also changed. Finally, companies deploying enterprise social networks have woken up to the fact that rollouts to everyone, regardless of need, won’t work. Instead, there are more intentional and targeted deployments designed to meet specific collaboration and communication problems within teams.

The upshot is that end-users are engaged more with daily usage increasing as much as ten basis points. This, in turn, is driving real value in enterprise social networks for companies that use them.