“Preserving the status quo is not a strategy.”  That’s how Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen kicked off the Adobe Summit on Tuesday. He was speaking of digital disruption and transformation in general, but what amounted to a vision statement could just as easily sum up the burgeoning new alliance between his company and Microsoft. The status quo in this case might be a shortsighted refusal to take platforms to market together because of old loyalties to .NET or Java, perceived strengths of other point solutions, and other ways of thinking about the exact same customers in distinct, limiting silos.
That sort of thinking will only hold a company back in the digital era, and Adobe Summit showed us a bold new step forward instead.  On a day featuring no shortage of other news– the unveiling of Adobe’s new Experience Cloud approach, for instance– the announcements around how the two software giants are making their months-old partnership real was what really stole the show. I spent some time making the rounds of the exhibit floor after the keynote, and everyone I spoke to agreed on how exciting and groundbreaking the whole thing was, and is.

Quieting the Critics

When this alliance was announced back in September, there was no shortage of cynics eager to dispel the possibilities inherent in the onstage handshake between Mr. Narayen and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. If I had a dollar for every time that I heard “Adobe is Java, not .NET” or even “This is just another ISV to Microsoft,” I could retire happily today.
Yesterday proved the cynics wrong. This is more than just a paper partnership to these companies.  Much more. To begin with, the Adobe team highlighted the use cases and actual integration scenarios they’ve now published on their Partner Solutions Portal.  I’ve been digging into them and these are real-world examples of how these platforms can work together to deliver unparalleled customer experiences.

The Rubber: Officially Hitting the Road

At Perficient, we’re very much in tune with much of this, having taken it upon ourselves to prove out and design a recommended architecture for Adobe Experience Manager on Azure late last year. That’s one building block– and an important one for the enterprise.  Azure is a world-class enterprise IaaS platform in use by 90% of the Fortune 500.
Featuring incredible attention to compliance and 38 global data centers, Azure provides data sovereignty in more regions of the world than Amazon and Google combined.  The second scenario sees marketing data ingested from Adobe Campaign and uses Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM and Power BI to draw up powerful, real-time analysis. If you don’t know Dynamics CRM, perhaps you should get to know it– a full-featured CRM platform considerably more affordable than Salesforce.
Either way, Microsoft and Adobe are all about bringing global businesses closer to their customers– whether physically via Azure and data sovereignty, or digitally using the latest advances in marketing and analytics. This is more than just talk, though.

Adobe is Open for Business on Azure

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie soon took the stage to deliver the coup de grace.  All of the above sounds great, but at the end of the day, talk of integrations and potential benefits is still just vaporware.  To get real, you need real products– which is exactly what Microsoft and Adobe are giving us.

The key supported integrations now available in production from Adobe and Mirosoft.

Adobe Experience Manager versus Open Source: simple, right?
An open source solution is free by definition, while a product that regularly leads Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves is going to cost you millions more, right?
Right?
Well…no.  Not exactly.
I’ve seen enough platform selection exercises and total cost of ownership (TCO) engagements over the years to have a pretty good idea of where these things typically land, and in that context it continually amazes me that anyone in an enterprise still thinks this way.  Of course, many do, which is why it’s time for a little bit of myth-busting.  Let’s start with our very first false premise.
Fallacy #1: Open Source Software is Free.
This might be technically true when you download a freeware or shareware app on your PC, but in enterprise environments, open source is never free.
Large corporations of every sort—law firms, financial services giants, manufacturers, power and energy, health care, you name it—are subject to massive amounts of industry-specific regulations.  The software platforms they use need to be able to satisfy some fairly rigorous governance and information security concerns, or they’re going to wind up liable to the tune of millions.  Most readers already know this, of course—so why do numerous large websites sit on open source platforms like Drupal?
The answer: Drupal itself is open source, but for use in the enterprise it requires a rigorous helping of regular management and support.  That comes from third-party firms who—surprise—charge a premium that is seldom far off from the cost of licensing enterprise software like Adobe.  And the market will bear it, so they keep on charging it.  You would too, wouldn’t you, if you were in their business?
Fallacy #2: Adobe Experience Manager is Fabulous, But You’ll Pay For That Fabulosity
Let’s be clear: Any enterprise software platform is going to have a pricetag attached, and Adobe is no exception. The functionality you get with AEM is top-notch, never mind the other solutions across the integrated Adobe Marketing Cloud, and as a result they certainly do cost some money. That said, the perception that AEM is orders of magnitude more expensive than the competition is out-and-out incorrect.
As noted above, enterprises won’t do Drupal in its own right. They’ll typically engage with a third party that has extended Drupal to some extent—up to and including its own licensed, productized version—which winds up making an ostensibly “open source” project look an awful lot like a project with an enterprise software vendor.
Breaking It Down
I’ve seen enough competitive bids in the CMS space to tell you that—especially these days—an AEM bid is seldom all that far from a Drupal one. They typically stack up like so:
AEM: Software Licensing + Implementation + Managed Services
Drupal: Third-Party Markup + Implementation + Managed Services
It probably doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that the sums of these equations are seldom far apart.  That means when it comes to platform selection, it’s become far more about organizational fit and requirements than about pricetags and bargain shopping… and that should make just about everyone happy.

For people who write, edit, update or otherwise create and maintain web content, moving to a new enterprise CMS can be a pretty exciting process.  I’ve never met a content author or publisher who didn’t want at least a little something more from their authoring interface.  Typical questions and comments include:

• “Can we make it more like my WordPress interface?”
• “Do we really need all these workflow approvals?”
• “Can’t I just create it in a Word doc and upload it?”
• “How about automatic metadata suggestions?”

And of course, there’s my personal favorite:

• “What does this ‘wizzywig’ mean anyway?”

The requests are pretty standard– WYSIWYG aside– so common, in fact, that you’d think CMS vendors would have discovered the “killer app” years ago and by this point we’d simply be endlessly refining it.  To some extent that’s true, but different user interfaces continue to offer different means of accomplishing similar tasks.
For top-ranked CMS tools like Adobe Experience Manager, a good argument can be made that they really do make life easier for content authors, addressing questions like the ones above and more.  Like any other new tool, though, AEM isn’t going to be an automatic hit with this key constituency unless you make sure they understand its controls intimately.  That’s where good change management comes in.

Change Management as a Critical Path Item

That’s right, I said good change management.  For every project or solution owner who still thinks (contrary to plenty of evidence) that “if you build it, they will come” remains an acceptable rollout plan for content authors– they’re smart people, they’ll figure it out, right?– there’s another two who think a quick email announcement and a video tutorial will do the trick for everyone.
Wrong.
Good change management understands that even an audience with a single unifying factor– like, for instance, job title and responsibilities (e.g., the modern Digital Content Manager or as we said in the 90s… yes… “THE WEBMASTER”)– is hardly homogeneous.   Different people learn in different ways, at different speeds.  For that matter, different people communicate in different ways, too.  Good change management requires not just communication and training, but plans for communication and training that are followed by sound execution.
This is what makes good change management part of your AEM upgrade or rollout’s critical path.  If you make your content authors aware of the training, and get them to consume it; if you provide quality training that addresses the different learning styles of your audience; if you encourage the audience to complete it and incentivize that behavior?   Only then can you start talking about a successful project go-live, no matter how error-free your DNS changeover was.

Communication and Training Plans

An internal communication and training plan for an AEM rollout will have a number of areas of focus, but for the intent of this post we’re focusing only on the content authors.  Ideally, they will be defined as a stakeholder audience with specific goals and objectives that you want them to achieve (namely: the ability to quickly and easily post/edit/administer content of any sort).
Recognizing this, your training plan should consider and ultimately, provide different styles of training.  A day or half-day of in-person instruction prior to go-live should be de rigeur, but it’s not a panacea either.  Guided video tutorials, a written manual (stored in a document library subject to a good search engine– hello, SharePoint Online) and even that old standby the quick reference card are all relatively easy to produce and sure to provide return on the small investment it takes to create and provide them.  Your content authors will thank you.
Of course, you also need to get your users to the training materials you’ve invested in.  A good communication plan targets dates and messaging types (we sometimes call this a communication architecture), mapping the path that iteratively builds your users from awareness (“I know we’re getting a new CMS”) to understanding (“I can use the new AEM tool”) to commitment (“Sure, I can create a whole new content vertical complete with metadata in just five seconds with that drag-and-drop interface… want my help?”).

The Content Author is Usually Right

As we mentioned above, there’s a good deal more to the change management aspects of rolling out a new CMS than simply addressing the content authors.  As the single most important audience of end-users after your customers, however, they’re an incredibly vital group to get right.  Make sure you intend to get a communication and training plan in place for them before your next upgrade or re-platform project kicks off.

At Perficient, we have extremely solid partnerships with both Microsoft and Adobe so– as previously noted in this space— we were keenly interested when this partnership was announced at Microsoft Ignite last fall.
Of course, simply sitting on the sidelines and observing something like this was not in our DNA.  We’re a team of doers.  In the time since the announcement, our 50+ Azure-certified consultants and award-winning Adobe architects have not been idle.  We have a pretty firm belief that if you’re going to stand up an Adobe Marketing Cloud environment in Microsoft Azure, you’re better off doing it with a partner that understands BOTH platforms intimately.
Our track record speaks for itself on that account, but it also means we have a lot to live up to.  Fortunately, we have some really bright people on both sides of the fence who have spent some time proving out what an Adobe architecture will look like on a Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
I’m very excited to announce our findings and begin some conversations on this new digital frontier.  In the coming weeks, both Greg Dawson from our Adobe practice and Brian Ball from our Microsoft team will be taking you under the hood on what we’ve put together.
Interested?  Me too!  Just stay tuned….

SEE ALSO: Adobe Experience Manager on Azure – Virtual Networks

The dust seems to have settled on this fall’s announcement of Adobe and Microsoft’s new partnership, and conventional wisdom says a lot of work remains to be done for these software titans to realize the promise of their new relationship.  That means I’ve witnessed a number of experienced observers of either company yawning, taking a wait-and-see approach to this announcement at best, and a cynical view at worst.
They’re making a mistake.
Maybe a big one.
Tuned-in CMOs are watching with interest, though.  They know this whole thing is about personalization, and they know what that could mean for their businesses down the road.
The exciting news for them is that the work’s being done, and the entire digital world ought to be listening.  Sleep on this partnership at your peril.
The Way Forward
If the ultimate goal of Adobe and Microsoft’s new alliance is, as these new comrades say, a shared ecosystem—an integrated platform and suite of services—providing personalized, mobile and cloud-first digital experiences, then we need to ask what that looks like for technology decision makers.
It turns out we can paint a pretty good picture just based on what’s out there today.
What do we know?  Well, for starters, you can’t build a shared ecosystem without a solid foundation. 
A Shared Ecosystem
In this case, that foundation is Microsoft’s Azure platform.  In the short term, this means the ability for enterprises to build Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions atop the same platform as Microsoft’s own digital experience applications—Dynamics CRM for data and Power BI for visualizations in particular.  In the longer run, that means tighter integration across and between the stacks.
Do Microsoft and Adobe have what it takes to do this?  Let’s take a look.
Cloud?  Check.  Azure is a leader in cloud infrastructure and Microsoft’s biggest bet.
Mobile?  Check.  Adobe’s AEM Mobile provides a quick and easy approach to building and managing mobile apps (with or without AEM for your .com site).
Personalized?  Check.  Take the analytics and personalization capabilities already present in Adobe Target and pair them up with the data in Dynamics CRM and… well, now you see what Adobe and Microsoft are so excited about.  Not just a check, but possibly a checkmate if everything breaks right.
Personalization is the Key
Personalization, then, is the part of the partnership that’s so ripe with potential for both of the software companies.  If this partnership was just about AEM on Azure, it would make great sense but it would fall so far short of what it could become.  Yes, every Adobe-savvy agency is hustling to contract with Azure talent, and every Microsoft systems integrator is looking to add some AEM skills… but while that might sound great to those of us who build your websites, implementation and hosting are low-hanging fruit for these guys.
Microsoft and Adobe both know that big data is king.  They each have products that are ridiculously good at collecting and even analyzing different kinds of customer data—but Salesforce can conceivably do both, together, at once.
They want to own this market, not hand it to Salesforce, and they want to compete hard… and that competition is going to be the driving factor behind some powerful integrations.  Those integrations will drive even more powerful and personalized digital experiences.
Hitting the Bottom Line
Personalization is accomplished when intelligence platforms like Sensei and Cortana collect and sift through reams of data about a user in order to predict or accommodate that user’s needs and next actions.
On a consumer’s side, you appreciate being served content and products that you are (or could be) interested in.  On the business side—and this is the bottom line— that selfsame data that drives your personalized experience helps a business sell you more stuff.
A platform that can sell you more stuff?  Most businesses will say “sign me up!” because the ROI of such a thing works really well in their favor.  That’s where Adobe and Microsoft would like to be, that’s what this partnership is all about, and that’s why everyone in the digital space and especially every CMO with a digital footprint bigger than my toddler’s shoe size should care.

Adobe is taking their industry-leading customer experience suite to Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering.  It’s been a few weeks since that announcement made the news, and it’s still a big deal.  Here at Perficient, we’re home to award-winning consulting practices in both Adobe and Microsoft solutions, so as the dust begins to settle, it only makes sense that we are working to help our clients understand what this can mean for their business.  Trust me—it means a lot of good things.
It’s well-documented that Adobe is the universally recognized industry leader when it comes to the online customer experience.  In other words, if you’re designing a new website—or upgrading an old one—Adobe is always on your shortlist.  Their combination of fully-integrated content management, analytics, marketing tools and media is all delivered via the cloud.  It’s a solution that stands alone.
Similarly, Microsoft’s Azure platform is a world leader in cloud hosting.  Thanks to Microsoft’s ongoing and huge investment in this technology and their datacenters, Azure offers unparalleled security, innovation, dependability and scalability.  When considering where and with whom to host your new website, justifying anything other than Azure is a tough sell when the facts are considered.  Even Amazon Web Services—and Adobe knows that.
It only makes sense that an organization looking for a best-of-breed solution for their online presence would look hard at putting these players together.  So why now?  And what took this long?

Understanding Adobe and Azure

So the Adobe Marketing Cloud is an integrated suite of best-in-class products that drive your online customer experience.  And Microsoft Azure is, among other things, the best cloud datacenter money can buy for hosting your website.  When you’re building or upgrading a website, these two should really go together like peanut butter and jelly, Lennon and McCartney, Kirk and Spock… you get the picture.  And the only thing that’s kept them apart until now?  Perception.
Seriously.
It’s this simple: Azure is a Microsoft platform, so traditionally when people hear “Azure,” they immediately put walls around it.  Those walls look a lot like a Windows server stack and .NET code base. (The fact that Azure is also the name of Microsoft’s cloud development platform doesn’t make matters any easier.)  Anyhow, that perception makes sense as far as it goes, but it isn’t true.  You can build any sort of architecture on the Azure platform.  We’re talking Java-based stuff like Oracle, or even Linux.
This isn’t a widely-known fact, or hasn’t been until lately, and in business perceptions like this can take a long time to change.  What it’s meant is that organizations looking at Adobe—which is rooted in Java—rarely if ever considered Azure.  That meant Microsoft didn’t have any sort of recommended architectures or specialized Adobe build patterns as a result.  You can expect that to be changing soon.
Now, as we mentioned above, Adobe is rooted in Java, and that means this perception factor for Adobe and Azure was a two-way street.  Just like shops that were looking at Adobe would dismiss Azure because it’s a Microsoft product, those that leaned to the .NET/Windows stack for their internal applications would dismiss Adobe for their public-facing website for similar reasons.  I’ve spoken with many, many clients who in the process of selecting a new web CMS would give this particular fault line an undue amount of attention.

Making it Work For Your Company

The funny thing is, picking a web CMS (or today, an entire online customer experience suite—which is frankly a whole lot more than just a CMS) based on the development language it’s built on is rarely a valid requirement.  This is especially true with the Adobe suite, since Adobe’s is a cloud solution and much of the ongoing CX/design/marketing work—everything but content authoring/editing, and sometimes even that—these days is outsourced to the agencies and systems integrators who do the initial builds.
Let’s say you’re going with Adobe’s cloud solution, then, and you’re choosing to place it in Azure—the Microsoft cloud.  Both are smart choices and the likes of Gartner and Forrester will nod their heads in sage agreement; you have the architecture requirement addressed.  But how much will it cost?
The answer to that is kind of the best part of this.  Microsoft is really motivated to sell Azure.  It’s a big bet for them, and make no mistake, they’re trying really hard to win it.  Cloud hosting these days is insanely competitive, and Microsoft has a great product.  Now they want their share of the pie.
In situations like these, it’s not uncommon to see Microsoft doing lots of incentives—funding architectural design and setup in particular—to help customers defray the cost of moving their architectures to Azure.
When you can get this to work for you, it’s kind of like paying an architect to come in and draw up the blueprint for your home’s remodel or addition, at a very low cost or even free of charge.  You still have to pay for the materials and construction, but having that up-front cost taken care of for you sure looks reassuring when you consider the total cost of ownership.

The Bottom Line

It’s a nice bet when you’re redesigning or upgrading your website for better customer outreach, analysis, and engagement to host it in a place that’s not only more secure but potentially more cost effective.  The Adobe Marketing Cloud in Microsoft Azure presents a compelling path to making this happen.
As we said at the very beginning of this post, Perficient has tremendous depth, skill and experience with both of these platforms.  We have a nationally-recognized, award-winning Microsoft cloud practice with 30 certified Azure consultants, and we’re an award-winning Adobe partner (one of only a handful to earn the Enterprise designation) with a great implementation background (case studies) and top-flight architectural knowledge.
If you’re considering Adobe on Azure—and why wouldn’t you be, at this point?—let us help you.  You’ll be glad you did.

Earlier this year, I returned to the world of e-commerce web sites after a long, long layoff (think the painful, patience-trying time gap between two seasons of “Games of Thrones”, then multiply it exponentially).  It quickly became apparent that the basic business requirements driving e-commerce, and the key integration points behind it, haven’t really changed at all.  The platforms and tools that handle it have evolved a lot, though, and one of the most valuable of those evolutions has been the emergence of PIM (Product Information Management) software for industries like manufacturing, consumer products and retail.  For companies that regularly manage hundreds and even thousands of products, this stuff is a godsend.
If you don’t know Product Information Management, in its most essential sense you could consider it the middleman between your ERP system and your e-commerce storefront.  It serves as a central clearinghouse for product data– a two-way integration point that can take your back-end data and ensure that the buyer sees exactly what you want and need them to see.
PIM sounds like a natural fit for both B2C (think retail and CPG) and B2B (think manufacturing) storefronts, and it is– but what’s surprising is how “emerging” this specialized software still really is, and how few companies are really taking advantage of it right now.  Many outfits trying to manage their product data are still using home-built custom solutions, which is a tough option when you consider that one of the driving principles of most approaches to enterprise architecture is choosing to “buy” a supported product over “building” a custom solution that you need to support, update and modify yourself.
As recently as four years ago, I was involved with a project that essentially wrote a custom PIM system from scratch for a major high-tech manufacturing firm’s B2B operation.  At that time, neither the client nor my team at the time had a strong “buy” alternative.  It was a real eye-opener for me to join Perficient’s award-winning digital commerce practice and learn about our partnership with inRiver, a .NET-based PIM platform that plugs handily into major ERP systems as well as InSite Commerce and other B2B commerce providers.  Having a single, user-friendly interface for product managers and others to enter, update and manage product information nearly blew me away.
It’ll blow you away, too, if you’ve ever managed an e-commerce website trying to store product data in its CMS– or pull it in directly from an ERP system.  Having done both of those things myself at the turn of the century, it amazes me to see that for all the innovations in technology since then, many of the world’s largest companies are still doing exactly that.  They don’t have to.
Check out our guide to the value of PIM and see for yourself.  You’ll see pretty quickly why I ask every e-commerce client I talk to, “What are you doing for PIM?”  Because if you’re not doing something, you’re not only making life harder on your product managers– you’re missing a valuable opportunity to put better information onto the product pages your customers are seeing.  And moving more product as a result.
Don’t wait for the next season of Game of Thrones– download our PIM guide today and get started.

Make no mistake—this week’s announcement of an Adobe/Demandware partnership is a pretty big deal for online retailers. In the words of Demandware VP Tom Griffin:

By integrating best-in-class rich content authoring and creation with best-in-class enterprise commerce, we can provide a single, unified solution for all consumer touchpoints. At the same time, retailers can optimize and personalize the shopping experience, in real time, by testing different content types based on purchase data. (Tom Griffin, Demandware)

Makes good sense, doesn’t it? The integration of best-in-class content authoring and publishing, digital marketing and analytics (Adobe) with an omnichannel commerce engine and storefront (Demandware) is so obvious that it’s kind of a no-brainer.
Of course, integrating content and commerce is nothing new. We’ve been doing it since the earliest days of the internet as a sales engine.  The two diverged as specialized platforms for first web content management, and then e-commerce, became the rage in the past decade—but the obvious next step on either side was to reach back out and embrace the other.
Certain platforms and software companies have seen limited success in this regard, but for quite some time the only way for an online retailer to achieve a “best-in-class” experience was through custom integration between a pure-play CMS and a pure-play e-commerce platform.

Born in the Cloud

To some extent, that’s still the case; Adobe and Demandware remain different companies with different software platforms and different licenses.  The value of this particular partnership, however—what sets it apart and makes it so exciting—is that it’s born in the cloud.
The Adobe Marketing Cloud is more than just the CMS—Adobe Experience Manager.  It’s digital marketing and analytics, rich media and more, and it’s a unified cloud platform offering the flexibility and scalability that software-as-a-service provides as its primary value proposition.  Similarly, Demandware is a purely cloud-based solution— and that cloud DNA is what sets it apart from the rest of its peers.  The ability to scale up or down quickly to meet demand is a huge advantage for any retailer—B2C or B2B—who anticipates seasonal or market-driven shifts in volume.

Not Quite Yet, Though…

Naturally, there will be challenges down the road as these software companies seek to present an integrated offering.  The integration itself is officially still in pilot mode, and big questions are yet to be answered.  As a wizened green Jedi Master told us back in 1980, “Always in motion, the future is.”  On balance, though, the prospects offered by this announcement are too exciting to ignore.

In the world of enterprise social networks, Facebook’s somewhat stealthy new offering has the potential to be a real game-changer.  According to TechCrunch, the product, known simply as “Facebook at Work”, is slowly building up a long waiting list of interested corporate customers.

Of course it is.  And why wouldn’t it?  Most everyone these days is working social, or at least giving lip service to the idea of trying– that revolution was fought and won several years ago– and with over a billion users, Facebook is the world’s most ubiquitous social platform.  From an adoption and ease-of-use perspective, there’s very little ramp time or training involved for people to adopt business software that they already use in their home lives.

Yammer has been living off of its resemblance to Facebook for a long, long time now, so one could argue that it’s high time Facebook got a little of its own back.  They’ve wasted no time in doing so.  For example, Facebook makes it easy to flip from your personal profile to your @Work profile and back again– just use a simple pulldown in either scenario:

And getting around the basic user interface works exactly as it does in traditional Facebook:

Note, however, the telling emphasis on Groups– a feature ramped up for @Work that has (perhaps not coincidentally) been steadily de-emphasized in the free, consumer version of Facebook over the past few years.  Facebook for Work, then, is easily adopted… does that alone make it a threat to the major social platform vendors?  Probably not– where they’ve been well adopted, Yammer, Connections, Chatter and Jive are fairly well integrated into how their customers work, and won’t get pulled out easily– but there’s a lot more to the story.

Three Reasons Facebook at Work Will Succeed

It’s fashionable in prognostication circles to take a skeptical, reasonable view.  That way, you’re never really wrong.  There are three key elements at play in the rise of Facebook’s enterprise platform that make its success more a question of when than if, however.

The adoption of current social platforms is hardly universal.  Yammer, Connections, Chatter, Jive and others all have their success stories, but the reality is that very few enterprise social networks have achieved full adoption yet.  Even the large companies most successful at “working social” feature thriving communities and very successful use cases in one part of the organization or another… often set off by entire departments that are more or less a social desert. While the battle to sell social software is over, the battle to adopt it is still being fought.  There’s plenty of room here for a player with Facebook’s deep pockets, easy adoptability, and built-in user base.

Integration to third-party apps is key for enterprise social platforms… and it’s Facebook’s bread-and-butter. For a social platform to work, users need to be able to seamlessly work with their trusted applications for both data and productivity.  With the social graph, Facebook is a pioneer in this space– in fact, they’re probably the one company more responsible for integrating apps into the everyday user’s experience of social than anyone else.  And with planned integrations to Box and Dropbox, never mind the real power play– Office 365– Facebook looks like a winner here already.

Facebook is always looking for new revenue streams.  Sure, they don’t always find them (remember Facebook credits?) but that hasn’t stopped them from constantly seeking new ways to monetize the “free, and always will be” social platform.  Capturing the enterprise market is a potentially lucrative play that would create a nice, steady stream of recurring revenue that would surely appeal to shareholders and analysts.

Even ignoring the success in the Asian market highlighted in the TechCrunch article, the three points above make things look pretty favorable for a big Facebook play in the enterprise space.  So if you’re Microsoft, IBM or Jive and you can’t stop them, can you at least hope to slow them down?

Three Challenges to Facebook in the Enterprise

Right now, Facebook at Work is missing three key elements for success as a social platform: good governance, reliable partner services for adoption and integration, and a clear commitment to the product from its corporate overlords.

Governance of any internal social network can be a pain to implement and monitor.  Now try it with a platform UX where users are already predisposed toward posting obnoxious kitten memes and photos of their grandchildren, you say.  And you’d be right.  That said, monitoring tools for internal social do exist, and the demonstrable behavioral trend of internal users to be good corporate citizens on social networks (usually enforced by their complete lack of anonymity, that great enabler of bad online behavior) makes this obstacle one we can realistically address.

Service partners play a very big role in successful social adoption, and Facebook doesn’t have them… yet.  Facebook is ramping up its sales staff to meet demand– but who’s going to help companies define those governance policies, install the inevitable monitoring software, and write the necessary integrations to line-of-business data and applications?  A strong partner network and services arm are needed in this secondary market.  One might consider it an opportunity for certain digitally-savvy consultancies (wink, wink).

Commitment, or “Is Facebook the next Google?” No matter how many clients are on their waiting list, nobody at Facebook is kidding themselves about how much revenue Facebook at Work can generate versus their traditional channels in the short term.  This isn’t Facebook’s core line of business– not by a long shot.  But where corporate gmail and inward-facing Google Search Appliances aren’t key to Google’s strategy,  keeping their users locked into their platform is pretty darn relevant to Facebook. It’s not helping Facebook make money when you flip your phone from Facebook to your Yammer or Chatter app to get work done.  But if it’s just a new tab in that Facebook app?  You’re never far away….

These challenges are real but certainly surmountable.  Social networks– and how employees interact with and on them– can be governed, with good monitoring and strong efforts for policy and training.  There’s no shortage of knowledgeable consultants out there who’d be happy to help companies get going with solid, value-adding business cases for Facebook at Work (Microsoft’s mass lay-off of their Yammer-focused Customer Success Managers is rather timely from this perspective).  And while Google and Facebook share a lot of similarities, Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing quest to monetize his platform and build, then retain its user base sets his company apart from their more quixotic Silicon Valley cousin.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Facebook is the sleeping bear in the enterprise social conversation.  Even the soundest hibernation comes to a natural end in spring.  And if, like me, you live in northern climes, you’ve probably noticed that spring is coming.  Like with iPhone and Android, the big software titans at some point will have to forego competing and simply accept that integration is the smarter strategy when dealing with this product.  That day is coming, and it’s not far off.

Perficient has today acquired Blue Rooster’s Rise Foundation product, a “UX as a Service” application for SharePoint (Online and On-Premises alike) that is basically a just-add-water intranet solution. The beautifully branded user interface, streamlined social and publishing features, and fully responsive design framework in the Rise Foundation package give organizations the ability to turn SharePoint into an engaging, accessible intranet portal with a minimum of the time and effort needed for a custom-developed solution. As you can imagine, we’re all pretty excited by this news.
Happily, I’m uniquely qualified to comment on the possibilities ahead for this product. At Microsoft’s Ignite conference this past May, I spent my time walking the floor researching various “boxed intranet” products for an article I later posted on CMSWire. At the time, I found the Rise UI to be friendlier than its competition, relying more on familiar website experiences and less on the “cutting edge”, Pinterest-flavored interfaces favored by other vendors (but not always by business users, who don’t like to be confused).
In the past few months, I’ve gotten to know the product much better. My initial confidence was buttressed first by a deep analysis a Perficient colleague performed on the technical back end—Rise cleaves closely to Microsoft’s Office 365 Patterns and Practices, a best-practice claim that not every such product can make. I was further impressed by the ability to further customize and build out desired functionality for our clients on top of Rise, if needed—a powerful value-add now that the weight of Perficient’s Microsoft delivery team is there to augment a first-class product development group.
On top of all of this, I’m personally thrilled to welcome the Rise team on board. I’ve known Blue Rooster for a very long time, and I can say with confidence that this move allows us all to work together to build on what was already some very exciting momentum. There’s no doubt that the future of SharePoint and intranet portals in general is one where products play at least as great a role as the services that support them, and I’m thrilled to say that Perficient now shares that view.
I’m looking forward to doing great things with Rise Foundation, SharePoint and our customers. Have questions? Drop me a line at rich.wood@perficient.com or ping me on Twitter!

Mobile is one sticky form factor.  So sticky that many states are finding it necessary to legislate people out of using their phones while driving.  In other words, the mobile experience is so compelling that some people literally won’t put down their phones unless you make using them illegal.

Meanwhile, intranets have traditionally struggled with user adoption.  I’m fairly certain every successful intranet project known to man has featured a “user adoption” component meant to help people understand when, where, how and why to use their intranet for actions beyond looking up the daily cafeteria menu.  This still holds true, almost twenty years since the first intranets sprung up from the ashes of Gophers and fileshares.

Mobile works.

Intranets… need work.

So why not use mobile apps to engage your erstwhile intranet users?

In my latest post over at CMSWire, I’ve outlined a (very plausible) scenario whereby the groundswell of user preference for mobile form factors could– and perhaps, should– spell doom for the concept of the enterprise intranet.  This is “digital transformation” writ large for employee productivity.

It’s a heady mix of mobile’s engaging (even addictive) UX, service-oriented architecture, software as a service (cloud/SaaS), and forward-thinking embrace of technology and consumer trends.  And you can just about pull it off with today’s technology.

Curious?  Go check it out.

In my latest post over at CMSWire, I’ve outlined a (very plausible) scenario whereby the groundswell of user preference for mobile form factors could– and perhaps, should– spell doom for the concept of the enterprise intranet.  This is “digital transformation” writ large for employee productivity.
Sound a bit loony, coming from someone who loves to envision, plan and build SharePoint intranets?  Possibly.  But in the scenario I’m discussing, SharePoint hardly goes away.  In fact, it serves as a back-end for many of the services users will be accessing via mobile apps on their iOS and Android– and yes, even Windows– tablets and phones.
It’s a heady mix of mobile’s engaging (even addictive) UX, service-oriented architecture, software as a service (cloud/SaaS), and forward-thinking embrace of technology and consumer trends.  And you can just about pull it off with today’s technology.
Curious?  Go check it out.