New eXo White Paper Showcases the Value of Social Intranets to the Enterprise
http://blog.exoplatform.org/2011/08/09/new-exo-white-paper-showcases-the-value-of-social-intranets-to-the-enterprise/
If social network sites were boring, no one would use them. But they’re not boring; they’re hugely popular. Java middleware firm eXo then asked the question: What if we redesigned our enterprise intranet as an internal social network? Not only for Chatter-style updates/activity streams, but more as a place where employees throughout the enterprise could interact and engage with each other, where they could share content and ideas, and collaborate on projects. Would it be more popular and useful than the existing intranet that, like so many enterprise intranets, few people actually use?

The short answer is yes, and a more detailed and engaging account of the company’s experience can be found in “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise,” a free white paper available at http://budurl.com/ygvh.

Unprecedented Employee Participation

eXo executives had a straightforward if ambitious goal: create an intranet that employees around the world would want to use. It would not be the dumping ground for meeting notes, HR memos, and other static content, but rather the crucible of employee interaction and ideas. It would be a customizable, extensible intranet, one that employees could personalize easily using dashboards, gadgets, activity streams, and more. It would be a place where they could create and share content with co-workers, with content management technology behind it all to maintain order and ensure easy discovery.

Using its own eXo Platform 3, eXo built out this new intranet and made it available to employees on January 1, 2011. Use of this intranet, and participation in the social spaces it provided, was completely voluntary—yet within 15 days virtually every eXo employee was actively engaging with it. eXo employees work from sites in the United States, France, Ukraine, Tunisia and Vietnam, yet they all meet and stay connected on the new eXo social intranet. They discuss and engage around projects, customer needs, bug reports, travel plans, even sporting events. There’s a sense of unity that did not exist before, a sense of common experiences shared across four separate continents.

A Replicable Model

In “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise,” eXo provides useful insights into the design and construction of its new social intranet. Key sections of the white paper include:

•	Dashboards: Central to the Modern Enterprise Intranet
•	Building and Organizing the Social Intranet
•	Using the Social Intranet
•	Impact and Unexpected Benefits of the Social Intranet

What becomes clear in this free white paper is that “going social” holds the potential for huge benefits for enterprises of all sizes. The tools exist today to create such an intranet, and the model can be replicated and expanded on the fly to meet the needs of virtually any organization.

Download “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise” at http://budurl.com/ygvh to learn more about the success that eXo has achieved with this new approach.

For more information on eXo, please visit http://exoplatform.com. For additional perspectives, visit and subscribe to eXo RSS blog feeds at http://blog.exoplatform.com/. Follow eXo on Twitter at @eXoplatform.

About eXo

eXo (http://exoplatform.com) offers the first and only user experience platform for Java. The eXo Platform makes Java websites and applications faster to build and easier to deploy, and offers modern features such as content, collaboration, social and knowledge on a services-based architecture. The company has established technology leadership and proven value by their large European installed base and strategic partnerships with Red Hat and Bull. eXo maintains U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, Calif. with global headquarters in France and offices in Tunisia, Ukraine and Vietnam. For news and updates from eXo, follow @eXoplatform.