Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) by LongJump

The term “Social Enterprise” has been floating around for some time. I am a big fan of “buzzwords” so obviously this is one I have followed. The “Social Enterprise” simply refers to the adoption of new social media technologies within the enterprise. Having been involved in past in helping “tame the Internet beast” for use within the enterprise at companies like Epicentric, I find this trend very exciting! The “Social Enterprise” is similar the notion of “Enterprise 2.0” but the former has a focus that the latter term lack – Social Media! Proponents of the “Social Enterprise” call attention to companies using social media technologies such as social networks, collaborations tools, blogs, RSS, syndication, wikis and social bookmarking internally as part of their business!

Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web (who is one of my favorite bloggers) recently did a great post titled “The Social Enterprise - What Works, and What Doesn’t” that looks at the reasons for the social enterprise. It focuses on the need for both agility and self-organization within the enterprise. Alex makes points out that “…with the increasing speed at which our society operates, we are seeing that companies have had to become more agile in order to compete.”

LongJump and the Social Enterprise
The LongJump application platform is very much about increasing the speed of business. LongJump enables the rapid use and adoption of businesses application within small and medium-size organization as well as groups within the enterprise. Some of the core application on the platform, such as OfficeSpace and Customer Manager, were designed to enable collaboration and self-organization. Components like discussions and document sharing enable user-generated content within the enterprise to be shared quickly and openly in a secure environment.

Levels of the Social Enterprise: Technology + Business + Network
At its core, the LongJump platform embraces the idea of sharing and collaboration by building key application on top of common data and application components. Data, such as contacts, company and other internal business objects can easily be accessed and shared among applications at a technology level. For example, the Sales force automation application leverages the contact manager, task manager and email.

Additional, applications like OfficeSpace, enable collaboration and sharing at a business level. So business concepts like relationships (vendor, employee, i.e.) and transactions (invoice, payables, i.e.) have a common understanding throughout the platform and can be shared and used between applications.

The way the LongJump platform integrates and interacts with external applications also speaks to its spirit of networking and integration at a network level. By providing the ability to openly and easily interact with external application and resources (Website integration to collect sales or job leads for example), LongJump essentially enables collaboration with external applications as well.