Content collaboration tools provide an easy way for employees to use and share content both inside and outside the organizations. Since these tools can be used to collaborate with customers, partners and suppliers, they often provide rich security and privacy controls. Today, much of this functionality also can be found in other tools such as cloud office platforms, workstream collaboration platforms, content services platforms and content services applications. Functional differentiators in dedicated CCTs are difficult to identify.
The ECA market consists of vendors offering a discrete application, well-defined module, or cohesive set of capabilities that enables people in “communicator” roles to plan, create, coordinate, and distribute internal communications across the workforce or to specific audiences. ECAs include analytics that measure interactions and effectiveness of communications across content, channels, devices, campaigns and feedback loops to assess business and employee value.
Enterprise social networking applications facilitate, capture and organize open conversations and information sharing between individual workers and groups within an organization. In addition to capabilities that support conversations and information sharing, they can keep track of the network of relationships between participants (via social graphs), in order to deliver a personalized stream of updates about events or conversations to individuals (via news feeds and activity streams). These applications help people find out about each other, have discussions, share information and generally interact. Interaction occurs either at a one-to-one level, or in groups, teams, communities and networks, and in the context of structured or unstructured business activities.
Gartner defines an intranet packaged solution (IPS) as a software product that organizations use to create and deploy an internal website or network of websites, portals, hubs, mobile apps and other digital experiences supporting business-to-employee needs. An IPS is delivered as an integrated assembly of capabilities geared specifically for intranet use cases, including employee communications and engagement, employee service and self-service, application access and knowledge services. “Packaged” signifies a holistic and fit-for-purpose approach. In contrast, a custom-built or developed approach would leverage a platform or array of products not specifically designed to support intranet use cases.
The market for social software in the workplace includes software products that support people working together in teams, communities or networks. These products can be tailored to support a variety of collaborative activities. Buyers are looking for virtual environments that can engage participants to create, organize and share information, and encourage them to find, connect and interact with each other. Business use of these products ranges from project coordination within small teams or homogeneous groups, to information exchange between employees across an entire organization.