For the past year and a half or so Connectbeam has been wandering in the wilderness telling anyone who will listen that social bookmarking was not simply popular applications like del.icio.us or Furl that allow web addicts to mark and share their favorite links online but an enterprise tool with real potential to help companies make their knowledge workers more productive.  They’ve had some success, but last week the pioneers got some serious validation when IBM Lotus announced that its internally developed Dogear social bookmarking tool would be an integral part of its new Lotus Connections release. 

What Connectbeam does basically is help enterprise users tap into the collective knowledge of their co-workers. It integrates the popular concepts of social bookmarking and social networking with search, but adds specific workflows, security settings,  rules and permissions and other standard enterprise safeguards.   I sat in on a telephone presentation by Tom Mandel of Connectbeam last week and he explained how the application works in some detail.

When you first login to Connectbeam, you see information that is grouped under two key areas; ‘My Workspace’ and ‘Colleague’s Workspace.’  Beneath these headings are topics, which are like folders but with a social network or Collaborative Framework around them.  Topics can be anything; accounts you’re targeting, products you’re working on, your personal space, information you’re gathering every day and so on.  A dashboard tells you what’s inside each topic, as well as the number of bookmarks and the subscribers that you’re sharing the information with.  

Click on to a specific topic and the application will take you inside where you can view the bookmarks and documents that are there already and start collaborating by entering comments or adding bookmarks and relevant documents.   If you want to invite someone else into the topic, you type their e-mail address in a box and they’ll get an invitation. When they click on the link in your invitation,  the topic you’re sharing with them will automatically appear in their ‘Colleague’s Workspace.’  You can specify whether a particular topic is just for yourself, a group, or whether it’s a company wide topic.

When you want to add a new bookmark to a topic—whether it’s a web page or a page from the intranet or extranet—you click a bookmark plate at the top of your tool bar that pops up a ‘Save to Connectbeam’ dialogue box where you select the topic you want to save the bookmark into. It also gives you some suggested tags which you can pick from or you can add you own.  Click ‘Save’ and the information is saved and the pop up disappears.  The bookmarks are added in order by date so you can easily see what’s new.

Connectbeam gets really interesting when you add ‘Search’ to the process.  In fact, (to steal a line from Forrest Gump), Connectbeam and enterprise search go together like peas and carrots.  Let’s say you want to find some competitive information on IBM inside your company.  In Tom Mandel’s demo, he typed “IBM” in the search box and found 18 results  Nothing special about that but in that but the search also turned up a number of  related tags and related users.  Tom clicked on the name ‘Julie Foltz’ and up popped a detailed profile of Julie Foltz, including not simply her contact information but also her areas of expertise and a tag cloud that reveals she has been following IBM closely.  If the searcher is interested in any one of the  topics that Julie is tracking, he or she can  bring that topic into their own Collaborative Framework by clicking on ‘Add this topic to my Colleague’s Workspace.’

Connectbeam has taken an agnostic approach to enterprise search and the application integrates easily with all the major search applications to bring all of the core features of social software (social bookmarking, content tagging, virtual communities of information sharing and discovery, rich and dynamic user profiles, and social networking) into the enterprise. 

In fact, the Connectbeam folks are a sponsor of the FASTForward Conference in San Diego next week.  Be sure to stop by their booth and take a look.