One of the things I keep hearing from customers (buyers of enterprise software) here at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit is that as they start to make the leap and begin purchasing social platforms and tools from vendors, they are getting left out in the cold when it comes to roll out. Often broken deployments, poor documentation, ever changing interfaces with lagging documentation, half-baked features, the list went on.

These conversations are just reinforcing something for me that I have believed for a long time: When you sell collaboration tools, you are taking on a level of responsibility that software vendors have not assumed in the past.

One of the big offenders appears to be IBM. The chief complaint being that their new platforms such as Quickr are so poorly documented and there is so little use case and other guidance that IT departments that are installing it aren’t able to properly train users. There were also several mentions of incomplete and downright broken features being put in to the software at critical social junctions. The response from IBM, according to was that those particular features were still in testing. You hear this less about Sharepoint, but the reliance on integrators would explain most of that. I have also heard the same thing about smaller vendors, but the level of satisfaction seems to be higher.

I did not experience this first hand — I am not a customer and have only demoed these tools — so take it with a grain of salt — this is all anecdotal of course, but it is making a clear point: Vendors need to understand the implications of social software and guide their clients in both achieving the maximum impact from social tools but they must also help mitigate the initial pain.

This is a new depth of the customer-vendor relationship, but for the short-term at least, it is going to be a prerequisite for successful deployments.

What we have right now are traditional vendors, IBM, Novell, Microsoft and BEA in particular, who understand that Social Software can open up a huge new market for them, but they are not at all ready yet themselves to properly address the market needs. They are showing a level of immaturity and irresponsibility that is unsettling. Instead of looking to outside thinkers and experienced practitioners for guidance, they are putting their customers at a huge risks post-deployment while promising too much up front.

Organizations with an internal locus of self control will gravitate toward smaller vendors and vendors who provide toolkits that the organization can customize and deploy in their own way. Longer term, customer are going to start buying social tools that fit specific needs in their value chain and workflow, and we are finally starting to see vendors popping up to provide these tools.

Much of this runs counter to my recent position that the incumbents are going to sweep up the majority of the new market and the space within the existing markets. I still think that is true, but I think the long term outlook is much fuzzier.