Conference

Insider's Guide to Evaluating Architectures and Selecting Vendors

Monday, November 14, 2011, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

Industry commentators tend to 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 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.

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.

The workshop will also de-mystify the highly crowded and fragmented social software marketplace – Including social services from CRM vendors, collaboration suites, pure-play blog / wiki / social-networking products, community platforms, and revamped portal offerings from major vendors— enabling participants to compare and contrast competing vendors. 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.

Course Outline

  • Mapping the Social Technology Landscape
  • Aligning Technology Evaluation with Business Use-Cases
  • Assessing Common Functionality and Architectures
  • What You Should Know About System and Administrative Services
  • Categorizing the Vendors
  • Strengths and Weaknesses of Key Players
  • Best Practices for Selection and Implementation

Who Should Attend

  • Developers and Systems Architects seeking to distinguish among the various “back-ends” of common social toolsets
  • Program and Project Managers leading technology selection projects
  • Enterprise Architects looking to reconcile competing internal social computing projects
  • Consultants needing to teach clients about the Social Software marketplace
  • Community, Web, and Intranet Managers looking to compare their incumbent social applications against what’s available in the marketplace

You Will Learn

  • 11 common social computing business scenarios and how they map to relevant toolsets
  • Pros and cons of 12 different types of social applications
  • 19 universal application, administrative, and system services, and why they matter to your implementation
  • How to group and differentiate 30 leading social software vendors and open source projects into 6 major marketplace categories
  • Pros and cons of several of the major platforms
  • Best practices for identifying the “best fit” for your enterprise

Photo of Tony Byrne

Instructor:
 Tony Byrne
President
Real Story Group