Transforming enterprise communications through the blending of social networking and unified communications

Abstract

The blending of the emerging technology of social networking with unified communications has the potential to radically change how enterprise employees communicate. Enterprise social networking applications help employees build organizational collective wisdom and work more effectively by discovering implied relationships through shared social data. Unified communications applications provide suites of real time and non-real time communication enablers like click-to-call, click-to-IM, presence, and voice mail. Blending these two technologies permits text/audio/video conversations to be treated as social objects whose data and metadata can be stored, searched, tagged, and followed in social networking applications, just like other social objects such as people. In turn, exposing social data about conversations enables innovative new capabilities like recommending conversations for someone to participate in based on inferred interests, or finding and contacting an expert based on knowledge about conversations in the social network. This paper describes People & Projects, an experimental application used in Alcatel-Lucent to investigate advances in enterprise social networking. It also outlines early work on the integration of social networking and unified communications.