EMC deploy Clearspace
With my background in Enterprise Content Management, one of the blogs I’ve been subscribed to for a long time is Chuck Hollis, from EMC. EMC Documentum is a competitor for my former employer, TOWER Software, so back then, it was prudent to keep an ear out for those guys. As my focus moved away from ECM and towards Enterprise 2.0, I kind of stopped reading his posts regularly.
Which was dumb, because, as I found out from Jeremy, it turns out that he’s just as excited about emergence and social media in the enterprise as I am. So much so, that he’s started a dedicated blog detailing the deployment of Jive Software’s Clearspace within EMC.
The immediate question for me upon hearing this news, was, “Huh? EMC already own two products that claim to be able to do this stuff.”
Documentum Collaboration and eRoom were both touted to “enable distributed teams to work together more efficiently”, and yet EMC’s selected product was neither of those. They opted for a third party solution outside the ever-growing catalog of EMC Software.
After catching up on about half-a-years’ worth of posts, I found the answer, beautifully identified by Chuck himself in this post. After discussing Transactional Collaboration (workflow), and Document Collaboration (sharepoint, eroom) he goes on to discuss what he called “Social Collaboration”:
…Doing it in the margins between meetings isn’t efficient or productive, and having formal “brainstorming” sessions doesn’t always feel quite right. And if someone schedules another conference call, I’ll cringe.
It’s not predefined interaction. It’s not a structured workflow. It’s something entirely different than the other two collaboration models. It’s people talking with each other about what’s interesting — hopefully in a work context.
Brilliant! That’s exactly what it is. It’s about knowledge workers being able to share, discuss and distribute the things that they know and care about, without being shoehorned into a process box, or a pre-defined meeting space.
The most productive information enterprise is the one with the smartest, best connected people that can adapt and make the best decisions. Not the one with the biggest, most perfectly enforced quality procedure manual.
Chuck, welcome back to my collection of must-read feeds. 
Oh, and speaking of those, Sam Lawrence from Jive Software also shares his experience with the EMC deployment over on his blog, Go Big Always.
Hi — glad I was able to help out a bit in any way possible.
I’ve been writing the blog for a while, knowing that — at some point — there will be more people like me who are done with listening to everyone else, and want to make something happen at their company.
Like I did.
As we went along, we learned some fairly unique lessons we hadn’t heard anywhere else out there, so I decided to start capturing our experience as “bread crumbs” for others that will most surely follow.
I think this stuff is going to be big, I do …