Appirio Digs Deeper Into Social Enterprise With Toolkit

Cloud provider Appirio Salesforce.com's social enterprise vision

Comprising nearly 20 social assets, some of which were built through Appirio's CloudSpokes crowdsourcing development community, the toolkit targets a trio of challenges inherent in any social-focused enterprise rollout: integration between new and existing applications and social networks, making new social applications engaging for users and ensuring compliance with company policies, said Appirio co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Narinder Singh.

For integrations, the Appirio social enterprise toolkit offers Google+ to Chatter integration, which lets users post from Google+ to Salesforce Chatter, the company's business social network, using hashtags. The toolkit also contains Facebook to Chatter, LinkedIn to Chatter and Twitter to Chatter offerings that take updates from those popular social sites and posts them to Chatter.

On the user engagement side, the toolkit offers Chatter influence, a tool that measures a users' influence within a chatter organizations; RSS to Chatter groups, which enables users to pull RSS feeds for news and other information into Chatter groups; and tool that photos in e-mails to be sent to chatter organizations.

And to ensure compliance, the toolkit features Chatter compliance, which enables admins to receive alerts when certain keywords are used in Chatter.

Singh said there are a host of other assets in the toolkit, which is part of Appirio's overall social enterprise strategy which offers technologies, services and communities to help companies go social. Appirio's social enterprise plays include a social enterprise blueprint that defines a social blueprint across sales, marketing customer service and operations to leverage social platforms like Salesforce and Jive and enterprise Chatter implementations. Appirio also offers social platform integration that connects and extends the social cloud with integrated solutions for the public social Web, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; the private social Web, including Jive, Yammer and Rypple; and the Salesforce platform of CRM, Chatter and Radian6.

According to Singh, the contents of the social toolkit are available on any mobile device at the Web site m.socialenterprisetoolkit.com. The toolkit browser, also built using CloudSpokes, lets users view tools and descriptions, vote which tools are most useful, share them on social sites including Facebook and Twitter and submit ideas for new tools. And to spur innovation and activity around the toolkit, Appirio is sponsoring a contest on CloudSpokes to build the most popular new idea and will award the winner $1,000.

According to Singh, the toolkit is a step in adding real value to social technologies in businesses and giving customers something that they may not have considered is a possibility.

It's part of the social enterprise charge that Appirio, along with Salesforce.com, has embarked upon to streamline business collaboration through the use of social tools. It stems from the idea that Facebook is connected to everything, so why can't an enterprise app like Chatter have that same reach in business.

"Marketwise, we're super early with social enterprise," Singh said. "But in our customers it's a very frequent conversation. Companies are asking: How can we use things like this internally?"