An Introduction to Enterprise Collaborative Bookmarking

Matt Moorehttp://engineerswithoutfears.blogspot.com

Objectives & Agenda

This presentation aims to provide an overview of collaborative bookmarking with a specific focus on intra-organisational applications. The primary audience is the end user of such a tool rather than the IT shop charged with its implementation.

•What is collaborative bookmarking?•Why is it important?•How do you do it?•Who else has done it.•Further information & technical comments.

Collaborative Bookmarking Basics – What is it?

Personal Bookmarking

• Allows you to retrieve sites you find.

• NOT shareable with others.

• Hierarchy but little metadata.

Collaborative Bookmarking

• Allows you to retrieve sites you find…

• …AND share them with others…

• …AND browse/search the sites they have found.

• Metadata via tagging & folksonomy.

Collaborative Bookmarking Basics – Why is it important?

Collaborative Bookmarking is of NO interest to you if:

•You never collaborate with anyone else in your work.

•You do not use a changing and varied selection of internet and/or intranet pages in your work.

•You are not interested in working more efficiently and effectively.

Collaborative Bookmarking Basics – Why is it important?

However, if you do collaborate using web-based resources then collaborative bookmarking can:

•Provide multiple ways for you to retrieve your own sites (through tags)

•Allow you to share the sites that you use with others.

•Allow you to track the sites that specific people you know use.

•Allow you to see how they use them (through tags).

•Allow you to see who in your organisation looks at the same sites as you.

•Allow you to see how others use them (through tags).

•Observe patterns in tags used at the individual and group level (weak signal detection).

•Support the development of taxonomies in emergent areas.

Collaborative Bookmarking Basics – How do you do it?

1. Select & install software

2. Tag sites yourself

3. Search bookmarks

By Tag

By Person

By Site

Three Easy Steps…

1. Select & Install Software

a. Select the software – see technical appendix for your options.

b. Get the software set up (varies by product)

c. Install the software (as a user)• Install the tagging button (see del.icio.us example)

• View your bookmark list

• Import links from your personal bookmarks (e.g. IE)

2. Tag Sites Yourself

a. Hit the tag button while on the page you wish to tag.

b. Then just add your metadata.

3. Search Bookmarks

a. Search by tag terms

3. Search Bookmarks

b. Browse by Person c. Browse by Tagcloud

Enterprise Collaborative Bookmarking Implementations

Product Organisation Challenge

MITRE are a US non-profit research organisation with has 6,700 scientists, engineers and support specialists. MITRE developed a Scuttle-based tool called onomi to aid in information sharing, information discovery, community formation & expertise finding.

Honeywell is a global engineering company with 122,000 employees. Connectbeam was deployed to allow their engineers to perform knowledge discovery, research and sharing across multiple resources in multiple locations.

BUPA is the UK’s leading private medical insurer with 40,000 employees. Cogenz was deployed to: facilitate networking across the organisation; create a knowledge base on the intranet, improving intranet search; analyse tag patterns as a source of information about intellectual capital within the organisation; Feed users’ content tags into Autonomy search engine to improve automatic indexing of content.

Headshift are a UK specialist software design company with 20 staff. Headshift have found Cogenz particularly valuable at the research stage of projects, where there tends to be a real flurry of contributions. They see that about 25% staff post daily, 50% staff post monthly and 100% staff “consume” information.

iConcertina wanted to: consolidate employees’ own use of public social bookmarking services; allow staff to continue using del.icio.us for bookmarks they wanted to share outside the organisation; store and share references to online intelligence amongst team working across continents and time zones.

Technical Appendix

Collaborative Bookmarking - Solutions

Type Examples Advantages Disadvantages

Free Web Service • Free• Accessible• Little or no technical set-up

required

• Privacy & security• Technical control

Point Solution• Hosted or Installed• Open Source or

Commercial

• Greater control over technology & privacy

• Comparatively low cost

• More technical expertise required to install & maintain

• Generally not free• Technology platform may not be

supported within organisation

Suite Solution • Should be easy to deploy with same-brand products & relevant in-house expertise

• More expensive• May only be available as part of a

suite.

Del.icio.us

IBM Lotus Connections

(Dogear)

Collaborative Bookmarking Links & Photo Credits

Linkshttp://connectbeam.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/connectbeam_ann.htmlhttp://www.openparenthesis.org/2007/02/09/scuttle_drupalhttp://www.cogenz.com/http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=344&page=1

Photo Creditshttp://www.anthroflex.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/delicious-gifts.JPGhttp://paddleandoar.com/images/delicious.jpghttp://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/06/imb_deliciousresults_foodcomm.jpghttp://www.pro-it-service.com/images/delicious_tag_cloud-thumb.gif