WANTED: Enterprise Social Networking Test Advice

After a couple days here at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA it's clear to me that both supply and demand for enterprise social networking systems is growing. Participants may disagree on how revolutionary are the changes such software will bring about, but there is at least a consensus that social networking techniques can unleash productivity benefits by better channeling in-house expertise towards business ends.

Such software systems are strategic to enterprises. Companies need as much information as they can get on them. Therefore such systems need to be tested by outside parties. Byte proposes to conduct such tests.

We want to hear from you:

• How should we choose products to test?
• How should we test products?
• We need to seed the systems under test with a common data set of employees and other company data. Got any tips for good sources of such data?
• We can't fairly or effectively test performance of such systems, but by what other major criteria should we judge products?
• What else should we be asking ourselves about such tests?

Please use the comment feature below to give us your views on the matter. If you want to contact me directly, e-mail me at lseltzer@techweb.com.

Thank you.

Larry Seltzer Editorial Director, Byte