Kaango, a web classified advertisement software platform, has joined the Atex global family of companies. As part of a deal that keeps Hearst Corporation and MediaNews Group as shareholders. Atex plans to expand Kaango worldwide. Kaango, which launched in 2006, provides a Web-based software platform to syndicate and publish print and online classified ads. A key feature of Kaango websites is they do not send users clicking away to unknown sites to view and interact with ads. This allows Kaango’s media partners to provide large ad volumes and a consistent user experience within each marketplace. Kaango also supports social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as cross-posting to multiple Twitter accounts to support individual publishers. Atex will offer the Kaango service and brand to non-Atex sites as well as Atex’s current client base, as well as integrating Kaango technology within Atex’s advertising and Web content management systems. http://www.atex.com/ http://www.kaango.com/
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 36 of 97)
This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.
I just published a new white paper, Social Publishing with Drupal, sponsored by Acquia and also available here. We forget that publishing and blogging (including this post) are stove-piped operations. But what would happen if we could intelligently keep track of all these disparate threads, combining the authoritative content from trusted sources with insights from friends and colleagues, organized contextually around the ways we think about things and make decisions? Social publishing is a new lens for delivering business value.
Here’s the executive summary for the white paper. Click the link above if you’d like to learn more. What’s the future of social publishing? Let’s start a debate. /geoff
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social publishing combines groomed and authoritative content, produced by an organization and emphasizing its core messages, with user-generated content that customers contribute via blogs, wikis, and social media tools. Drupal is an example of a social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project, and delivered at an affordable cost.
Drupal is now deployed in major media companies, high technology firms, universities, magazine publishers, government agencies (including the White House), research groups, and non-profit organizations. Whether it is in a commercial, non-profit, or government setting, organizations rely on Drupal to project their presence over the web and to channel the interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.
By leveraging Drupal’s capabilities as a social publishing platform, organizations are able to reinforce their branded experiences and deliver relevant content to their customers and stakeholders. By exploiting Drupal as an open source project, developers supporting these organizations can easily enhance and extend Drupal’s capabilities, and introduce innovative modes of interactivity that meet specific business requirements.
Drupal is an attractive investment with substantial business benefits. Organization can keep their license and support costs modest by building on an open source project. Organizations can leverage the collective expertise of Drupal developers to solve immediate publishing problems. By relying on Drupal, organizations can stay abreast of the rapid technology changes when building competitive solutions for the digital age.
Acquia has launched Drupal Gardens into private beta today, e-mailing out invites to the intial batch of people who signed up to be beta testers. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal which is remotely installed, hosted and upgraded. It is designed to have an interface similar to sites such as WordPress.com or Ning. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens aims to be a tool for organizations that want to build social sites. While currently on a private beta you can sign up to request an invite, and Acquia expects to transition to a public beta by spring 2010. Drupal Gardens will be available for free to the public throughout all of 2010. www.drupalgardens.com/
In a Regulatory Notice released earlier today, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) opined that brokerage firms and their registered representatives must retain records of all communications related to the broker-dealer’s business that are made through public blogs and social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
“Every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate, through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications as required by Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and NASD Rule 3110. SEC and FINRA rules require that for record retention purposes, the content of the communication is determinative and a broker-dealer must retain those electronic communications that relate to its “business as such.”
Brokerage firms will now be required to archive and make discoverable business-specific content produced by their employees. They will also have to establish and maintain procedures that ensure a supervisor has either approved an interactive electronic communication before it is posted, or that a “risk-based” method of post-communication review exists and is exercised.
“While prior principal approval is not required under Rule 2210 for interactive electronic forums, firms must supervise these interactive electronic communications under NASD Rule 3010 in a manner reasonably designed to ensure that they do not violate the content requirements of FINRA’s communications rules.
Firms may adopt supervisory procedures similar to those outlined for electronic correspondence in Regulatory Notice 07-59 (FINRA Guidance Regarding Review and Supervision of Electronic Communications). As set forth in that Notice, firms may employ risk-based principles to determine the extent to which the review of incoming, outgoing and internal electronic communications is necessary for the proper supervision of their business. “
In addition, FINRA’s guidance states that all organizations under its purview must establish and communicate social media usage guidelines for their employees, and that those individuals must also receive employer-provided training on those guidelines.
“Firms must adopt policies and procedures reasonably designed to ensure that their associated persons who participate in social media sites for business purposes are appropriately supervised, have the necessary training and background to engage in such activities, and do not present undue risks to investors. Firms must have a general policy prohibiting any associated person from engaging in business communications in a social media site that is not subject to the firm’s supervision. Firms also must require that only those associated persons who have received appropriate training on the firm’s policies and procedures regarding interactive electronic communications may engage in such communications.”
FINRA’s guidance marks the beginning of a new era for financial services companies and their use of external social media. However, the Financial Services sector is not the only one that will be subject to regulation of communications made via blogs and other types of social software. An IBM Senior Product Manager related last week at Lotusphere that IBM customers in the Healthcare and Utilities industries were also beginning to ask about the management of user-generated and social content.
If your organization is currently required to comply with regulations pertaining to the use of email and instant messaging for business communication, expect to see similar requirements placed on your management of external blog and social media site posts in the near future. At some point, it is likely that these regulations will also be applied to internal communications conducted via enterprise social software.
Is your organization ready for this new era? Gilbane Group’s seasoned advisors can help you prepare to manage user-generated and social content. Contact us today to learn how.
Red Hat has launched a new online community focused on promoting everything open source. Aside from Red Hat’s own technologies, the site also promotes open source software and technology throughout various industries. The posted goals of the site is to promote open exchange, collaboration, rapid prototyping, and crowdsourcing to develop technologies for the greater good of humanity. http://opensource.com/
Box.net announced two new features that affect how its users view and share content on the Box platform. The first feature is an integrated content viewer that provides full-viewing capabilities online for a range of files inside the Box environment. The second feature, to be released over the next few weeks, aims to make it easy for users to share and embed all types of files anywhere on the web. These new capabilities are a result of Box.net’s recent acquisition of Increo Solutions and represent a step towards transitioning more users from a desktop environment and into Cloud-based content management. The integrated content viewer and embedding features support popular file formats, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, images, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files, audio and video. The ability to view and share content regardless of desktop software is geared towards a mobile and web-based workforce. Cloud Content Management facilitates sharing that is also trackable, giving IT departments visibility into how content moves within an organization and beyond. The Box platform also features workflow management, organic content discovery, trackable sharing, and can connect to other cloud solutions – such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps – through its OpenBox platform. http://www.box.net/
NewsGator announced that it reached a final agreement for the acquisition of Tomoye, which focuses on enterprise social computing built on Microsoft technologies. Via Tomoye, NewsGator adds a large market share of “Government 2.0” installations. Tomoye has experience in enterprise social computing, communities of practice, and cross-enterprise learning and collaboration dating to its inception in 2000. Similar to NewsGator Social Sites, Tomoye’s Ecco social computing software enhances Microsoft SharePoint by adding capabilities, including social media, social networking and communities. The acquisition adds to NewsGator’s support of SharePoint to encompass the Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Server (WSS), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This combination of product offerings could cover many scenarios from a quickly deployed standalone platform, to an integrated SharePoint WSS solution, to a customized MOSS 2007 deployment; and from intranet collaboration and expertise discovery to extranet customer and partner interactions to Internet communities for customers. NewsGator and Tomoye are both Certified Gold partners of Microsoft. http://www.newsgator.com/ http://www.tomoye.com/
Mainsoft Corporation, a provider of Microsoft SharePoint-Java EE interoperability software, announced a preview of Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes version 2.5. The software brings the SharePoint 2010-based professional network into the Lotus Notes email client, with support for SharePoint User Profiles and My Sites, aimed at Lotus Notes users to search for and connect with people they work with. Mainsoft is also previewing SharePoint integration with Microsoft Outlook. Available the first half of 2010, the production release will deliver the same document collaboration experience for Lotus Notes and Outlook users, aiming to minimize user training requirements for Lotus Notes companies migrating users to Outlook and Exchange. http://www.mainsoft.com
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
