Conference > Insider's Guide to Evaluating Architectures and Selecting VendorsIndustry commentators often focus on the cultural and organizational aspects of social computing and collaboration. Yet, technology choices can also have a major impact on business effectiveness.
In fact, enterprises seeking to implement collaboration and social software find that competing technology alternatives can differ markedly in functionality, maturity, approach, and support. And recently, a market already roiled by fierce competition between major platform vendors and plucky best-of-breed players has seen the entrance of a new wave of suppliers promising to offer collaboration as a layer, to "socialize" your existing applications. Meanwhile, many SharePoint licensees struggle to get full value from a platform that comes up short in key social application services.
As a customer, you have more choices than ever, in terms of architectures, delivery and license models, functional breadth, and integration alternatives.
This fast-paced workshop will share customer research from noted evaluation firm Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch) on leading social software platforms, and provide a framework for customers to assess technology choices based on their particular needs. Specifically, the session will provide a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a roadmap for evaluating social and collaboration technology vendors. It will also clarify your architectural choices in a marketplace where interoperability standards remain more promise than reality.
The workshop will also de-mystify the highly crowded and fragmented collaboration and social software marketplace. You'll learn the key differences among platform vendors, collaboration suites, pure-play blog / wiki / social-networking products, community platforms, and emerging social "layers" enabling you to compare and contrast competing options. Real Story Group will also share strengths and weakness of some of the leading players, based on customer research.
The workshop will conclude with an exploration of best practices in technology selection and implementation.
