By Parsa Rohani CEO, Neudesic

Neudesic Pulsewas honored this week to be included as a ‘Strong Performer” in “The Forrester Wave: Activities Stream, Q2 2012” report, the latest look at enterprise social software from Forrester Research.

Forrester focused their report on the top companies in the activities stream space and noted the tight cluster and thin margin separating the players at the top of the field. Among the top companies Forrester reviewed, Neudesic Pulse was singled out and recognized for its integration with Microsoft products, which we recently strengthened with our launch of Neudesic Pulse 3.0.

“Neudesic comes from a history of professional services with a focus on Microsoft products. Not surprisingly, it has seen strong initial traction within its traditional customer base and has found a sweet spot filling social gaps in SharePoint 2010. However, Neudesic has a much broader strategy that many will find compelling. The integration with Microsoft reaches far beyond SharePoint to include Lync, enabling unified communications and Microsoft Dynamics on the business applications side. Pulse, while tightly integrated with SharePoint, is designed for integration with any user environment. It is also designed to consume data from any source, Microsoft or otherwise. Neudesic’s ability to provide professional services support to these complex, but valuable, integrations will help to drive deeper value from Pulse.”

What is notable in Forrester’s coverage is that Neudesic Pulse’s broader capability to integrate with any application or enterprise system is compelling to CIO’s.  Within our own customer base we have seen that this type of integration is a key factor in a driving active use and in achieving direct ROI and business value from Enterprise Social.

Neudesic has a long history and strong record as a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold ISV Partner.

Additional Resources:
• Follow @NeudesicPulse on Twitter.
• Like Neudesic Pulse on Facebook.
• Learn more about Neudesic Pulse.

By Ramin Vosough, Vice President Products, Neudesic

Neudesic Pulse received some important validation this week when Forrester Research recognized the enterprise social software as a “Strong Performer” in its latest report evaluating activities streams as part of enterprise social offerings.  The report found narrow margins separating the top performers, and Pulse matched the highest scores in the areas of Execution on Social Strategy, Management Team and Product Roadmap, as well as Licenses or Active Users.

In “The Forrester Wave: Activities Streams, Q2 2012” (Forrester Research, Inc., Rob Koplowitz, May 17, 2012) Forrester aptly noted that activities streams are the foundation for creating a social layer or, as we refer to it at Neudesic, a social fabric. While some organizations want enterprise social software that operates in its own silo, more and more enterprises are seeking social collaboration solutions that provide both stand-alone features but which can also integrate into existing enterprise applications and systems such that enterprise knowledge capture and collaboration is ubiquitous and not limited to a single application.

“Social activities streams are a bridge to this enterprise social vision,” Forrester said in its report. “They connect workers to each other and to information. On its own, the information workplace lacks a mechanism that pulls together events, along with their context, background, and required actors, in a manner that is attractive and easily consumable for knowledge workers. This is where the activities stream comes in.”

The key to an activities stream – and the social fabric approach – is to be both a stand-alone Enterprise Social solution without any other dependencies but also have the flexibility to be located anywhere a user wants to capture and communicate information and get work done. Neudesic Pulse Unified Activity Stream capability offers companies a unified and connected experience of Social across all their platforms and applications as well as a native Web UI experience.

Additional Resources:
• Follow @NeudesicPulse on Twitter.
• Like Neudesic Pulse on Facebook.
• Learn more about Neudesic Pulse.

While social networking has become a popular way for people to communicate outside of work, we realize that social networking within the enterprise is still a new concept for many organizations. A common theme we find is that many companies are excited to adopt an enterprise-specific social media tool for their organization, but when deploying, they often experience an initial excitement and high adoption rate that fades dramatically over a short time.

One reason that enterprise social networks lose traction is that many people don’t necessarily know how to engage, and don’t understand the boundaries of what is appropriate to share, and not appropriate to share, in the workplace.  We’ve provided here some top tips for interacting and making the most out of your company’s enterprise social network.

1)      Executive Involvement: Executives set the tone. They should be active and frequently engage with employees via their enterprise social network. This encourages collaboration and information sharing with all levels of the organization, contributing to the company culture and leading to a more efficient, knowledgeable workforce.

2)      Mix it up: Executives should allow the sharing of both personal information as well as business. This humanizes the company and adds to the culture. It also encourages people to continue to collaborate.

3)      Knowledge Sharing: Frequently sharing your knowledge and experiences over your company’s enterprise social network expands the company’s knowledge, and contributes its effectiveness and overall success.

4)      Share your Expertise: Making sure your areas of expertise are widely known and easily tagged, not only allows you to make yourself available as a resource to others, but also expands your opportunities throughout the company.

5)      Share of Voice: Sharing your opinion is important – as long as you’re not complaining. Many organizations with enterprise social networks have designated areas or forums to express your opinion. This not only gives everyone a voice, but also ensures that everyone is heard.

At Neudesic, we try to follow these guidelines in our own use of Neudesic Pulse. If you have other suggestions or examples of what’s worked for your organization, please share them in the comments.

Some of you may have already seen the great report Charlene Li and her colleagues at Altimeter Group recently released on enterprise social networks. The news media sure noticed it, and publications such as Fortune, PC World  and Technorati have covered the results from various angles.

At Neudesic, we’re excited to see enterprise social getting this kind of attention. These results show that the enterprise social space is still young and very much up for grabs. Although some of our competitors were noted for their shares of the market, 21 percent of respondents to the Altimeter survey reported using an ESN outside of one of the handful of dominant players.

Although we have seen firsthand the transformation that can happen when our customers leverage Neudesic Pulse to create a social fabric in their organizations, there is still a lot of skepticism in the market that enterprise social can work for them. The top line results of the Altimeter survey were that many companies who have dipped their toes in the enterprise social water are not achieving the results they’d hoped for. As we’ve noted before, that points a failure by some of our competitors and an opportunity for Neudesic Pulse, especially with the new Pulse 3.0 functionality we’re set to announce next week.

Despite the challenges that continue to face enterprise social users, the Altimeter study does a great job explaining the real benefits that can come from using an enterprise social network. A couple of our favorite examples:

• Managers at a grocery chain shared expertise on topics such as how to run a beachfront store to building relationships with the Hispanic community. Social capability is helping them drive sales by quickly sharing expertise.
• A new CEO posted questions asking employees what the company was doing right and what needed to change. It helped him learn about the organization and signaled to workers that a new type of relationship between leaders and employees was dawning.

These benefits can be hard to measure, and Altimeter lays out some tips for measuring success. It’s not easy:

• Measure gap-closing, not engagement. Tie your highest-level business value metrics to the gap you are trying to close and not to engagement activity. For example, if a key gap is reducing the power distance with executives, how many times do executives engage across levels? Using an internal survey, find out if employees feel more connected to executives. Check in with executives to see if they are getting better information about the needs and concerns of employees.

• Track relationships, not conversations. The amount and frequency of conversations and

engagements is an alluring metric to use, but it’s difficult to find meaning and value in this

broad number, especially if the most valuable conversations take place in private groups

where you can’t easily track them. Instead, create a map of the social and interest graph of

your organization to see where there are “hotspots” — and see if they correlate to gaps

being filled. Over time, the number, nature, and depth of relationships between people and

with groups will be a much stronger indicator of the health and value creation of your ESN.

We recommend you take a look at the full survey and let us know what you think in the comments.

Earlier this month, Forbes’ CIO Network posted an article, “10 Guidelines For Choosing An Enterprise Social Network,” by Neudesic CEO Parsa Rohani.

The article was aimed at helping business and IT leaders make a smart choice when they consider how to choose and implement enterprise social software. Parsa wanted to express the point that technology features are important, but even more important is understanding how the new relationships created by enterprise social can add value to the organization.

Here’s an abridged version of Parsa’s 10 guidelines:

1. Tie to business goals: Consider overall goals — customer relationships, knowledge sharing, product development, project management, etc. — and how more effective collaboration can help achieve them.
2. Know what’s not working now: Determine current barriers to communication. Is information trapped in email? Do critical documents get buried in inboxes? Are workers unable to identify experts that would help other parts of the company?
3. Choose wisely: Select technology based on your current barriers to communication. Features are important, but it’s more important to think strategically about how the software will address challenges.
4. Don’t fix what isn’t broken: You probably don’t need or want to throw out everything you’re already using.
5. Think about integration: Maybe you’re already using Microsoft SharePoint, CRM or other platforms. Some enterprise social software integrates well with them. Others operate as a separate silo. Integration means higher user satisfaction and adoption.

Implementing your enterprise social network is more than just a technology deployment:

1. What does success look like? It’s important to go beyond counting the number of posts and people using the network. Those things get to the quantity but not the quality. Look for what’s below the surface – new connections between employees who didn’t know each other, stories of how the collaboration capabilities helped close deals, time and cost savings by relying less on email.
2. Executive support: Require consistent C-level involvement. If the boss uses it effectively, employees will follow suit.
3. Preach openness over appropriateness: Create guidelines for generating and maintaining employee adoption and employee rules and guidelines. But don’t be draconian. Our own HR director, Kevin McClelland, has a rule of thumb: If it’s appropriate for the lunchroom bulletin board, it appropriate for the social network.
4. Give incentives for participation: When someone does something worthy of praise, the network is an ideal place to post acknowledgement from a supervisor or executive.
5. Make a splash: Build anticipation. Train people in advance. Get them excited. Again, let the company leaders set a strong example.

Just six months since we added new features and functionality in Pulse 2.0, we are back with major enhancements to our fast-growing enterprise social networking software.

The changes we’re announcing Monday at Microsoft Convergence in Houston include the addition of direct messaging, video support, language customization and other new capabilities. Pulse 3.0 also features deeper integration with Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 and CRM. This is important because Pulse continues to be the best option for enterprises already relying on Microsoft systems to run their companies.

By integrating with the systems that workers are already using, Pulse creates a social fabric across the enterprise, giving employees immediate access to information and experts as well as better collaboration capabilities across teams and geographies.

This social fabric approach sets Pulse apart from our competition. Pulse is the only enterprise social software available in the cloud, on-premise and mobile and across the entire Microsoft stack and our customers’ legacy systems.

If you’re at Convergence this upcoming week, we’d love to show you Pulse 3.0. We’ll be running demos at Booth 2210 throughout the week. Stop by and see us.

Here’s what’s new in Pulse 3.0:

• Direct messaging
  • Enables one-to-one or group conversations without leaving Pulse.
  • Integration with email and Microsoft Lync ensures messages are delivered whether the user is online or not.
  • Files can be attached to DMs.

• Video
  • Share videos across the enterprise or with specific users.
  • Enables downloading or streaming video straight from your newsfeed.
  • Supports Content Delivery Networks to make file and video downloading faster.

• Customer Relationship Management integration
  • Makes CRM single sign-on.
  • Search and communicate with CRM without leaving Pulse.
  • Pulse will alert users to new opportunities, leads and deal results.

• Unified Activity Stream
  • Pulse Unified Activity Streat keeps conversation streams connected across CRM, SharePoint, Office 365 and line-of-business applications.
  • No need to check multiple places.

• UI updates
  • Access to full Pulse API.
  • System redesign makes it easier to follow any subject.
  • Adds “Search This Feed” option.

• Security enhancements
  • More control over systems feeds.
  • Improve active directory authentication support.
  • Single sign-on across SharePoint on premise, Office 365, CRM on premise or online.

• SharePoint improvements
  • Sync documents on Pulse with SharePoint document library
  • Enhancements to SharePoint Search within Pulse.

• Autosubscribe
  • Administrative ability to autosubscribe users to ensure they follow groups, systems and tags that are important to the company.

• Favorites
  • New “Favorites” feature gives faster access a user’s most important feeds.

• Language customization
• Adds international language support.
• Translate text, labels and buttons to any language.

The state of the modern workplace has changed dramatically in the last generation. Teams are more likely to be geographically diverse. We may be just as likely to work on a project with a colleague in New York, London or Bangalore as the person in the next cubicle. At the same time, we are also more likely to be working together on projects with continuously changing details, obstacles and even team members – some of whom may work at our company and some of whom may be with outside partners.

To torture the old saying, there are more cooks in the kitchen, more ingredients in the broth, and more people in the dining room waiting to eat – and their expectations for a quality meal are no lower than they were before technology and the global marketplace changed how work gets done.

At Neudesic we’ve put together a list of common scenarios that we think apply to all organizations in this modern work environment. By no means is this an exhaustive list and we would recommend you give some thought around even more specific scenarios for your business. Again, this is just a start but we think it will get your social juices flowing.

1.      Run a project efficiently

When working with teams, it is often hard to keep all of your valuable information organized and in one central location. Collaboration software like Neudesic Pulse transforms the way that teams within companies interact with each other. Pulse enables the ability to share files, get feedback on ideas, and ask questions all on one page.

2.      Ensuring your questions get answered correctly

Without enterprise-wide collaboration tools, individual workers have limited reach within their organizations. Pulse allows you to ask questions to everyone in your company, but it goes a step further: Pulse will automatically recognize who the experts are on subjects within your company. Expert recognition ensures that you get answers from reliable sources, as well as helping spread your expertise to colleagues with whom you don’t normally interact.

3.      Keeping track of your team

Tracking your team’s status and progress is a crucial part of being a valuable leader. Pulse provides a space for you to log and record your team’s progress. This capability keeps you more organized and more involved in your teams day to day progress. This also keeps your team in touch with each other, allowing them to share knowledge about each other’s work.

4.      Making sure everyone is aware of potential roadblocks

Sharing a company- or team-wide issue through email can often lead to a long list of replies that don’t always apply to your work. With Pulse you can share the issue and provide a forum for employees to provide feedback without flooding everyone’s inbox.

5.      Keeping your team focused on critical tasks

Keeping your tasks up to date in a calendar is effective and useful, but integrating a task function into a social collaboration instance improves the ability to stay focused on the tasks for which they are responsible. Pulse provides a place for your team to update, prioritize and organize tasks without the inconveniences of email.

6.      Keeping your documents, thoughts and ideas organized

As the amount of information gathered in your company grows, it becomes increasingly more difficult to locate old documents, files and ideas efficiently. Pulse has provided a solution to this issue by creating tags. By tagging something, you are automatically putting it into an online filing cabinet that Pulse organizes for you, making it extremely easy to locate all the information you need regarding a certain topic.

7.      Sustaining a great relationship with your partners and customers

Customers and partners want to be more and more involved with the day-to-day actions of the enterprise. Neudesic Pulse Bridge provides a secure environment for you to invite a select group of partners and customers to join a private group page where you can collaborate in the same way you could with people within your enterprise — but with the security of not granting them access to your entire Pulse instance.

For more information about Neudesic Pulse please visit: www.NeudesicPulse.com

Earlier this week, Information Week published a report on the results of its “Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey.” Information Week questioned 394 business technology professionals at companies using one or more internal social networking solutions. The results present some major challenges for our industry.

The good news is those challenges are far more substantial and troublesome for our more established competitors, who likely dominate the landscape at the companies in this survey. Where they have been failing, Neudesic Pulse has opportunity. We can be the knight on the white horse that rides in to rescue the princess from the evil villain.

Consider these finding about how those surveyed characterize their internal social networks: “Only 13% say they’re excellent, 25% good, with 37% average and 25% fair or poor. For a high-profile initiative that everyone from the CEO down is watching, a 62% chance of producing average or worse returns counts as a high-risk proposition.”

Yikes. That is a scary proposition for an executive considering adding social to his company, but it represents opportunity for Neudesic Pulse. That 62% of respondents who characterized their internal social networks as average or fair to poor are looking for alternatives to the platforms they’re using now.

User adoption continues to be the biggest challenge for companies that use internal social networks. (See graph below.) We’ve seen it over and over: A company installs the software and tells workers to use it. And they do – for a couple weeks – before going back to their old routines because the new technology didn’t help them do their jobs any better.

Again, this is an opportunity for Pulse. What many of our competitors don’t seem to get – and this was reinforced in the Information Week survey – is that employees have a lot going on and don’t want yet another siloed application that they have to use. Pulse adds the social layer to the platforms and applications they’re already using. It meets them where they are. That’s a big reason why Pulse sticks where others fail.

Pulse has a lot of momentum going into 2012. Clearly the market is hungry for what we have to offer. Let’s take advantage of the areas where the competition is failing.

 OnWindows.com recently took a look at the advances in social collaboration within SharePoint and they highlighted Neudesic Pulse. Here is a brief preview:

“A couple of pieces of news from Microsoft partners have emerged in recent days that highlight the use of Microsoft SharePoint as a platform for social collaboration.

Firstly, enterprise automation solution provider ACRM Software & Technology is adding Calinda Software’s social collaboration offering for SharePoint to its product portfolio.”

Read More

Here is an article written by CMS Wire that talks about social collaboration within SharePoint and more specifically Neudesic Pulse. If you like what you see below click the “Read More” link to read the full article!

According to Forrester Research, social computing is one of the primary reasons why SharePoint 2010 adoption
has surpassed all goals and predictions, with over 80% adoption in the enterprise (and making solid inroads into
the SMB space), much higher than previous versions of SharePoint at this stage of the lifecycle. However,
expectations for social tools have also expanded since SP2010′s general availability in the spring of 2010.

Read More