Essential Readings: Social Collaboration Technology goes Digital Workplace Hub / Platform

This week we had a discussion about the changes in the digital workplace technology market which brought me to the idea to bring together some recent articles on how the “Enterprise 2.0 / Social Collaboration” Technology stack has changed in recent years. When we started our “Enterprise 2.0” event journey back in 2008 – it was a very fragmented landscape of different tools enhancing the legacy IT with new networking and collaboration ideas – like blogs, wikis, activity streams etc. From those days towards today we came a long journey via more centralized all-in-one collaboration systems like Jammer, Jive and Co or socially enhanced IT infrastructures like SharePoint and the IBM Connections approach to today’s platform and infrastructure idea for the digital workplace.

The new idea with today’s understanding of the “Digital Workplace Hub / Platform” is the integration of decentralized individual workplace apps that have deep point-to-point integration with the business process layer in a commmunication hub to support a enterprise-wide exchange and collaboration. While the Digital Enterprise Suite vendors have an integrated view on this, we can see different new ecosystems emerging on different levels and layers.

The following articles are providing my key reference readings – and therefore this week’s of essential readings – to this new technological foundation:

So long, app silos: And welcome to the digital workplace hub:
A summary on the technological developments during the last years – from the key analyst in the field: Dion Hinchcliffe. His discription on the key characteristics of this new digital workplace hubs is as follows: “A digital work foundation that is a) open and deeply integrated, and — this is the real success factor — b) is backed by a working ecosystem of application partners that’s sufficiently large enough to provide enough off-the-shelf app integrations to create significant additional business value to most workers.”
Digital workplace update: Why enterprise collaboration is exciting again:
Another post by Dion Hinchcliffe of a later date – explaining the foundation of the “Enterprise Collaboration Shift” with a already often referenced graphical outline of the future of the Digital Workplace Technology Stack:
Collaboration software company Jive to be acquired by Aurea for $462 million: A review of Ron Miller, a TechCrunch technology editor, of the take-over of Jive by Aurea (a Customer Experience Management Platform) and the importance of the collaboration features for the customer-facing processes.
Was Huddle Doomed Among Enterprise File Sync and Share Giants?:
A write-up of Dom Nicastro, a CMSWire staff editor, on the recent acquisition of one of the best-of-breed vendor Huddle from the Enterprise Collaboration space – and about the challenges of mid-market players.
Infographic: SharePoint Social Ecosystem:
A great chart on the best-of-bread solution ecosystem that layers on top of the SharePoint/Office 365 offering of Microsoft by Communardo Software:
Mapping the Employee Experience in the Digital Workplace:
Another perspective to the same topic by the team of the Real Story Group lead by Tony Byrne and interviewed by Gloria Lombardi. With Tony Byrne’s words: “Many people think about their digital workplace as a stack of enterprise tools. We want to change that view. We want to challenge businesses to reimagine their digital workplace from a functional perspective rather than a platform perspective.”