Our situation at EMC may be a bit unique.

First of all, Documentum (a top-shelf enterprise content management platform) is an EMC product.  Not surprisingly, we have a corporate deployment with all of our content in it.

As part of our social environment, we can expose enterprise content with links, etc.  What we really want to do is capture social interaction as content that can be corporately managed, something we can't do quite yet.

Stepping back a bit, I have come to the conclusion that having some sort of content/document management capability is an essential requirement to really push internal social media collaboration.  You've got to be able to expose corporate content in a meaningful and in-context way, and ideally capture wikis et. al. as corporate content.

Not a new topic in my discussions with my good friends at Jive.

What if it could be converted to PDF format? Would that help?

I was tasked with soliving this issue at my organization, and to-date still have not found a good solution. Because quality documentation is produced in a highly collaborative environment, I have been experimenting with Clearspace. Unfortuantely, I have found a great deal of limitations when it comes to creating taxonomy and document standardization. I feel as though standardized documentation needs a great deal of structure to ensure consistency, searchability and re-usability... something that is very difficult to enforce in the midst of social media's "controlled chaos." Does anyone have any examples of taking collaboration to standardized documentation out in the wild?

Here at Nike, I've been on a project that uses Jive to expose Documentum.

Just like the EMC thread, we expose Dctm assets as links embedded in Jive's Documents, Discussions & Blogs.

I'm wondering what best practices are when it comes to this area.

We're thinking of going to 3.x since it has the ability to create new Document types

so in our case, we'd create a Dctm Document type.

Perfect!  I'll check it out and comment.

ken

On 5/20/09 9:29 AM, "austen.rustrum" <clearstep-community@jivesoftware.com

Hi Ted,

Provided there is some sort of services API to access the information you want to pull into SBS (there should be), it is definitely a possibility!

As described by a previous poster, document management systems, such as Documentum or Sharepoint, are for corporate documents that require versioning, change control, and security.

We also need file sharing in Social Networking applications, beyond pictures and videos, so that members in the community can share business documents, such as presentations for the attendees of a conference.  In that scenario, less is more regarding features.  You don't want versioning or security.  The security that governs the community, provided by the social networking application, is sufficient for the document sharing as well.  You do want the ability to organize the files in folders (in any number of nested levels, although a few is probably sufficient), and you want the ability to have a few fields to describe the document, title, description, author, and maybe a user-defined field or two.  Also, if you have a LOT of documents, the ability to assign tags for search engine purposes would also be helpful.

We use Sharepoint internally to manage corporate documents. 

We want to create social communities and be able to share files within the communities.

The fact that a document might be redundant by existing in both places is not an issue to us.

The fact that the document in the community might become out-of-date is not an issue either.  If it is important for the document to be kept up-to-date in the community, then the poster of the document should keep it up-to-date.  Otherwise, it should be viewed as a point-in-time look at a document that was interesting at the moment.