Participation was voluntary, yet eXo had nearly 100% of its employees—from sites around the world—using its eXo Platform-based social intranet within 15 days
- eXo captures the allure of social networks and turns it to corporate advantage.
- Employee engagement and cross-departmental collaboration has increased.
- Visit http://budurl.com/ygvh to download the free white paper.
SAN FRANCISCO — August 9, 2011 — If social network sites were boring, no one would use them. But they’re not boring; they’re hugely popular. Java middleware firm eXo then asked the question: What if we redesigned our enterprise intranet as an internal social network? Not only for Chatter-style updates/activity streams, but more as a place where employees throughout the enterprise could interact and engage with each other, where they could share content and ideas, and collaborate on projects. Would it be more popular and useful than the existing intranet that, like so many enterprise intranets, few people actually use?
The short answer is yes, and a more detailed and engaging account of the company’s experience can be found in “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise,” a free white paper available at http://budurl.com/ygvh.
Unprecedented Employee Participation
eXo executives had a straightforward if ambitious goal: create an intranet that employees around the world would want to use. It would not be the dumping ground for meeting notes, HR memos, and other static content, but rather the crucible of employee interaction and ideas. It would be a customizable, extensible intranet, one that employees could personalize easily using dashboards, gadgets, activity streams, and more. It would be a place where they could create and share content with co-workers, with content management technology behind it all to maintain order and ensure easy discovery.
Using its own eXo Platform 3, eXo built out this new intranet and made it available to employees on January 1, 2011. Use of this intranet, and participation in the social spaces it provided, was completely voluntary—yet within 15 days virtually every eXo employee was actively engaging with it. eXo employees work from sites in the United States, France, Ukraine, Tunisia and Vietnam, yet they all meet and stay connected on the new eXo social intranet. They discuss and engage around projects, customer needs, bug reports, travel plans, even sporting events. There’s a sense of unity that did not exist before, a sense of common experiences shared across four separate continents.
A Replicable Model
In “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise,” eXo provides useful insights into the design and construction of its new social intranet. Key sections of the white paper include:
- Dashboards: Central to the Modern Enterprise Intranet
- Building and Organizing the Social Intranet
- Using the Social Intranet
- Impact and Unexpected Benefits of the Social Intranet
What becomes clear in this free white paper is that “going social” holds the potential for huge benefits for enterprises of all sizes. The tools exist today to create such an intranet, and the model can be replicated and expanded on the fly to meet the needs of virtually any organization.
Download “The Unexpected Benefits of the Social Enterprise” at http://budurl.com/ygvh to learn more about the success that eXo has achieved with this new approach.
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“eXo has the proven technology, talent and market potential that I look for when considering which companies I’d like be involved with at a strategic level,” noted Bickel. “While enterprise companies have benefited from a wide range of open source options at the operating system and middleware level and with development tools, choices in applications and content services have been limited. This is the next significant opportunity for driving out costs in the enterprise. Given its pioneering history and its successes with large European customers, eXo is primed to lead this charge in North America. I look forward to working with Benjamin and his team to make this happen.”
“Benjamin is a smart, dynamic leader who has built up a lean but global company the old fashioned way — with solid technology, hard work and a disciplined eye on the bottom line,” said Khodabakchian. “I believe eXo has a bright future ahead of it and I am honored to have a part in shaping this.”