Collaborative tools for enterprise customers are all the rage right now. Microsoft, Google, Cisco, IBM, HP, and Oracle, among others, are all getting their feet wet in this space. And there have countless Twitter-for-enterprise startups popping up in the past couple of months, including TechCrunch50 winner Yammer.
But it’s Facebook that already has the killer platform. No, this has nothing to do with the social graph; this has only to do with their technology, which already includes instant messaging, full messaging (although this is still subpar), micro-blogging, full blogging (through notes), and countless other social applications (a number of which are actually useful).
So what can Facebook do to create a sellable enterprise product? Here are some ideas:
- Create company-specific portals. Essentially, allow customers to create their own internal site (with their own domain) running Facebook’s software.
- Build (or buy) productivity tools, analagous to Google’s Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. The files should be fully encrypted, so that only the customer will have access to them.
- Make the mail system able to integrate with the customer’s internal e-mail.
- Make all employees on the system friends by default. Allow the customer’s management to create groups.
- Ditch the regular News Feed, in favor of the all-inclusive Live Feed. Create another tab for group Live Feeds.
This is a product a company could get a lot of value out of. Employees could engage each other socially in a familiar format, while also increasing their own productivity.
Facebook’s new design (emphasizing feeds and featuring an applications bar on the bottom) is perfect for this type of usage. And most of those above points could be done within a couple months, if not weeks.
With that said, Facebook could be facing an uphill battle in changing its brand from a 21st century timewaster, to a premium efficiency tool. And it’s not easy to create a major footprint from scratch, especially when existing players like Cisco are getting into this same space.
But Facebook is sitting on a terrific product, and could create a great business with it. That is, if recently departed co-founder Dustin Moskovitz doesn’t beat them to it (anyone else have that thought?).
Feedback? Write a comment, or e-mail the author at shawn(AT)squawkingbaseball.com
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