Going Live

As I write this, it's Monday morning. 

We spent all of last week getting our first social media platform up and running and suitable for human habitation.

It was far more work than I envisioned.

Are We Ready, Or Are We Really Ready?

For me, creating a good social media environment means that the platform and the processes have to be absolutely transparent to our end users.  If they have to go through lengthy registration processes, or if the tool behaves in a weird way, it'll put people off bigtime.

So I'm highly motivated that everything is seamless on Day 1 when we start inviting people in.

Going a bit further, we want this stuff to spread virally.  One of the ways to enable this is to make it as self-documenting as possible.  To the extent that potential users can be educated on context and process using the platform itself -- that's a good thing.

So, we spent all of last week trying to do just that.

When IT turned over the platform to us -- the sponsors of the initiative -- the basic software was up and running.  But there were all sorts of fit and finish problems.

To Make Matters More Interesting

We had new players involved.  Just communicating among ourselves turned out to be a major challenge.

The basic process of "I found a bug, I need to report the bug, what's the status of the bug" consumed an inordinate amount of time getting right.  I found myself reporting the same thing over and over again because I couldn't find what I reported on the publicly visible tracking docs.

Our (new) system admin was struggling a bit on this, as was I.

I was adamant that I didn't want lengthy conf calls, nor did I want to be discussing status using tools other than the platform we were working on.  No emails, please.

So, What Did We Spend Our Time On?

We wanted a seamless registration experience for our users.  We'd like them to be able to navigate over to the SM platform, and not really notice the difference in terms of other internal systems.

What this translated to was LDAP integration, followed by a SSO (single sign on) implementation.  That means that when you establish your credentials to the corporate network, you've also established credentials to the social media platform.

It also involved a lightweight registration processes, because there has to be some event that causes the information from the external directories (e.g. name) to be populated into the SM platform registration database.

Let's just say that we weren't very good at this, nor was our software vendor.  Be warned, especially if you are in a larger, more complex organization.  EMC has about 33,000 employees and a lot of corporate acquisitions, so things aren't as pristine in IT land as they might be.  Our IT guys (and our vendor) burned the midnight oil for over a week on this one.

As we sit here on Monday morning, we're halfway there.  You have to go to another tool to get a password, but once you do, it's easy to log in.  The browser credentials are extremely persistent, so I don't have to log in over and over again.

It's not as seamless as we would like, but it's OK for now.  And the teams are working to take it to the next level where there's no need to go to a separate tool, and there's no need to separately log in, ever.

I should point out that we've set up the platform to grant read-access to all comers (albeit behind the firewall) without the need to either register or log in.  The more people understand how we've set it up, the more they like it -- too many systems here already create artificial barriers around what you can see, and what you can't.

And when we weren't working on that, we spend our time on two other things.

Process Definition

We needed a couple of basic processes.  First, how does someone figure out the context here, e.g. what is all this about, and how do I use it?  Second, if someone wants to play, how does a user register?  Third, how does a community get built?

As far as "creating a context" goes, we created a "Getting Started" space and started to populate it with all sorts of contextual documents -- e.g. what was this all about, what it could be used for, some basics on blogging and creating communities, and so on. 

Now, all we have to do is flip a link to the space address, and curious people can probe around at their leisure.

The user registration process was an artifact of our temporary IT process.  I created a short doc (on the platform, naturally) so we could simply send a web address to anyone who might want to get an account.  The downside is that we're not notified if anyone does this, and we only have a limited number of licenses, so this implies an administrative process to track (probably daily) how many people have registered for using the platform.

We also had to think through the process of how does a community get built.  To do this, we created a "New Community Forum" space to help.

In this space, there's a few coaching documents on how to think of a community: focus, roles, etc.  We also created a template to help people answer a few basic questions.

The idea is that prospective community builders can post a proposal for their new community in the space, and we all can review and discuss it.  Once approved (by consensus), the admin will create a new space and assign it over to the new community builder.

We asked them to wait before immediate promoting their community to a wider audience.  The tools are new, and I'm sure can be used for all sorts of mischief. 

As I write this, one of our first community builders has inadvertantly succeeded in building a community with no content and no interaction for prospective users.  I'm sure everything looks good from his/her view, but we need to get a test user ID floated around so people can see what their work looks like from the outside.

We also have a playpen / sandbox space where prospective communities can be built, and then promoted (moved) to active spaces -- something that may not be obvious, but will probably prove to be useful.

There was quite a bit of debate on taxonomy -- so much so that I'm leaving it for a separate post.

But -- all that said -- the thing is up and running well enough that we can start inviting people on board.

Comments

[A]

hi Chuck,

I apologize about the LDAP hiccups (I was one of the guys burning the midnight oil on the vendor side), hopefully everything 'just works' now and you have a successful roll out!

Cheers,

AJ

[Chuck Hollis]

AJ

Thanks for the extra effort in hammering through the challenges we faced on LDAP.

Hopefully, we'll turn into one of those shining success stories for Jive -- I can see it from here.

It goes without saying that Jive has an extremely cool platform, and backs it up with extremely cool people.

Looking forward to more great things!