CMS Watch prediction 2008 No 7

Facebook backlash in the enterprise

Facebook is growing at stratospheric rates, with substantial momentum among professionals in general and media and technology companies in particular, the latter in some cases looking to supplement or replace their Intranets with this exciting (and free) new collaboration and social networking platform. Other enterprises will experiment in their wake, and in many cases, will retreat in disappointment.

Why? Despite Facebook’s well-deserved reputation for supporting presence and communications services, enterprises will learn that it is not an ideal platform for information-oriented collaboration, and therefore at best it can only supplement more serious information management toolsets. Of course, given the dreadful user experience working in most heavyweight packaged application solutions, any friendly new interface is a welcome development, but behind Facebook lurks deeper problems of access control (very coarse-grained) and security. Security has always been important, but we think next year it will become an even bigger deal.