What Is An Enterprise Social Network?
As the name implies, an enterprise social network (ESN) is an internal, private social network inside a company. ESNs grew out of the larger consumer social networking revolution of the early 2000s, with the goal of enabling faster, more fluid communication inside organizations and build stronger employee connections.
The basic ESN functioned like a “virtual water cooler” – a place where company personnel could make new connections and quickly share information. Unfortunately, this type of pure ESN proved to better for casual back-and-forth and talking about work than it was for getting work done. Filled with unorganized conversations and noise, the typical ESN became a time sink, and many companies abandoned them. Others have relegated them to non-essential status, used mostly for social connection, not business-critical functions.
The Limitations Of Conventional Enterprise Social Network Platforms
Conventional enterprise social networks are implemented as an overlay on top of existing apps. They add a layer of conversation that’s separate from the interactions, activities, and content generated in other systems—essentially a Band-Aid solution to a much bigger problem: the increasing fragmentation of communication and collaboration in companies.
As communication streams and collaboration tools multiply, it becomes tougher than ever for employees to stay on top of things. They spend more and more time just trying to connect the many dots. Scattered across myriad information islands, content gets more difficult to find, processes get harder to track, and vital knowledge gets buried and lost.
The answer isn’t to deploy more point solutions. On the contrary, companies need to consolidate disparate communications and collaboration functions in a central, holistic environment. That’s what Jive Interactive Intranet does. It combines the functions of a next-generation intranet, an enterprise social network, an enterprise collaboration platform and more – in one integrated digital workplace. It adds up to the most engaging virtual environment ever for sharing, connection, communication and collaboration.
Communication Tools For Every Purpose
Integrated Collaboration Hub
Jive provides a central hub for official and unofficial communications, team and group collaboration, employee onboarding, social connection, employee support and much more. Using Jive’s pre-built integrations with apps from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Box, Cisco and other vendors, you can also pull information and activity from an array systems into a common environment where everything is easy to find, share and collaborate on.
Out-of-the-Box Portals and Pages
Templated pages and portals make it easy set up and launch collaborative spaces for team, group and departmental collaboration. Business users can launch their own spaces in minutes – providing access to all the people, information and resources needed to get work done – in minutes. Users can create spaces for external contributors as well, bringing in partners, contractors and agencies, with security and privacy.
Personalized Experiences
Jive’s next-generation enterprise social network leverages proprietary PeopleGraph technology and machine learning to understand each person’s role and relationships. It applies this understanding to provide personalized experiences – such as customized news streams and content recommendations – that precisely match each user’s needs.
Discussions and Documents
Got a question to ask? Want to brainstorm an idea? Discussions let you hash things out fast without the hassle of meetings, disjointed email strings and conference calls. And Jive’s real-time document collaboration lets teams work together to create and edit rich content, complete with videos, images and tables, without version control issues.
Totally Mobile
Jive’s consumer-friendly mobile app keeps your employees informed and connected at any time, in any place. Employees can stay in touch with their teams, take part in conversations – even create and share content – right from their tablets and phones.
Smart Search and Discovery
Jive is a one-stop enterprise search engine. Find people, documents, conversations in a single search across Jive and connected systems. Jive supports the OpenSearch API, too, so integrating with other systems is a breeze.
Beyond Enterprise Social Networking Tools
An interactive intranet is a robust alternative to pure-play enterprise social networks, combining social features that help people connect and interact flexibly and quickly while getting actual work done.
Unlike limited enterprise social networks, where conversations take place in isolation, interactive intranets put communications, content and people in context, organized around projects, processes and business objectives. Employees can find everything they need to work together, make decisions and complete tasks in one organized space.
This includes information from external systems:
Jive’s pre-built integrations pull in content, conversations and data from a wide range of apps and platforms into the interactive intranet where everything is easy to access and easy to collaborate around. Jive Interactive Intranet also provides highly personalized experiences – delivering pertinent news, highlighting people and places of interest and suggesting content based on users’ individual roles and usage
The Future Of Intranets And ESNs
Too many companies are burdened with aging, neglected intranets that offer only static content, one-way communication and little, if any, collaboration.
At the same time, many companies are struggling with the noisy and chaotic communications unleashed by ESNs. It’s time to go beyond these limited tools to a platform that combines the capabilities of both technologies, along with those of modern collaboration systems, to power faster, more productive communication and collaboration.
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Take A Tour Of An Interactive Intranet And Its Social Features
See for yourself why the world’s largest organizations depend on Jive. Let our team walk you through a personalized demo and find out how an interactive intranet can take your organization to the next level.