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To measure the success of an internal social network you have to look at the adoption rate. That is the reason why YoolinkPro has always privileged the simplicity of use. In fact, a collaborative tool must be easy and no user should wonder how they use it but just… use it.

Thus, Yoolink has often preferred usability to features and simplicity to workflow. We focused on our tool’s ergonomics, speed and robustness. AJAX technology was used to avoid continuous page reloads and supply the only element that really matters: a great user experience. Today, our customers appreciate Yoolinkpro for its simplicity and efficiency.

Nevertheless, behind this apparent simplicity hide 138 features, which characterize a modern corporate social network. YoolinkPro’s features’ list on March 28th 2012:

Content publishing:

• Micro-blogging, with hashtags and auto-completion
• Links
  • Smart bookmarklet to publish directly from the browser
  • Automatic capture of thumbnail
  • Automatic capture of title and description
  • Mark as Read later
  • Suggest to other users
• File upload, with versionning
• Photo albums, with multiple upload and client-side resizing to improve uploading speed · F ·
• Events, geolocalization, RSVP in 1 click, numerus clausus, iCal export · F ·
• Wiki, with WYSIWYG editor
• Post from Twitter · F ·
• Re-post
• Comments
• Like

News feed:

• Images and videos visualization, with uploaded videos enconding
• PDF visualization · F ·
• Audio files streaming
• Personalized news feed for every user, depending on their subscriptions
• Company’s news feed
• News feed by team, or group
• User’s feed (via profile page)
• Possibility to follow :
  • everybody
  • a team
  • a user
  • a group
• Possibility to filter a topic
• Sticky notes: admins can highlight important posts
• Widget : trending topics (beta version) · F ·
• Filter by type (link, file, writeboard, event, …)
• Filter by kind (image, document, video …)

Knowledge and information structuring

• Groups directory
• Public groups: everybody can follow a public group
• Private groups: user has to request to follow the group
• News wires to broadcast information to the whole network no matter the users’ subscriptions
• Teams: structure of the directory. Admins assign teams to users
• Free tagging
• Tags suggestsions when publishing (smart auto-completion)
• Possibility to add resources to quick access on the home page or inside groups
• Possibility to publish in different public groups at the same time
• Quick access to your team(s) and groups

Search:

• Auto-completion with tags, groups and people
• Sort by date or relevance
• Weighted indexation of titles, descriptions, tags, URL’s and places
• Highlights of most republished contents
• Filter results by type (link, file, writeboard, event, …)
• Filter results by kind (image, document, video …)
• Search in the whole network
• Search in a group
• Search a user’s posts
• Tag cloud to affinate the search
• Suggestions of users having published on the searched topic
• Integration of results coming from the network in Google search results, using a FireFox plugin

Communication, reading and broadcasting tools:

• Instant messaging
• Private messages
• Daily news digest (Monday to Friday) summarizing user’s personalized news feed
• Possibility to suggest content to:
  • One or more people
  • One or more teams
  • Everybody
  • With direct email notification
  • Resend unread suggestions in 1 click (for managers/admins)
• Mobile Web app, compatible with iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, WindowsPhone
• Desktop app (Windows, MacOS, Linux) to stay connected with your network without launching a browser
• RSS feeds

Interface customization:

• Customizable logo
• Customizable header background
• Customizable interface colors
• Choose an existing theme
• Multiple header backgrounds · P ·
• Customizable login page · P ·
• Custom tabs · P ·
• Event tab · P ·
• Preview the changes before applying
• Add HTML widgets · P ·
• Add embeded widgets (IFRAME) · P ·
• Photo album slider widget · P ·
• Customizable subscription wizard · P ·
• Customizable users conditions
• Customizable domain name · P ·

Application’s connectivity and integration to your IT:

• API (http://api.yoolinkpro.com)
  • Authentification
  • User account creation / modification
  • User account activation / de-activation
  • Read / write on the feed
• Single Sign On
  • Microsoft Active Directory
  • Google App
  • SAML
  • LDAP
• Widget : login form to integrate into your coporate portal · P ·
• Possibility to interface with DAM tools
• RSS feed by tags
• XML export of posts and comments

Directory and profiles

• Directory
  • Small profile badges with pictures
  • Filter by teams
  • Filter by letters
  • Search by firstname / lastname
  • Fulltext search on profiles
• Profile
  • Firstname, lastname, picture
  • Contact informations
  • Role in the company, job title, experience
  • Team(s)
  • Groups subscriptions
  • People subscriptions (following/followed by)
  • Tag cloud and search
  • Recent activity
  • Possibility to customize the profiles fields · P ·
  • Social networks profiles
  • Every user also has access to a personnal space where they can find:
    • Their posts
    • Their recieved suggestions
    • Their private messages
    • Their marked as read later posts
    • Their attending events
    • Their feed settings and filters
    • Their profile edition
    • Their language settings
• Birthdays: week birthdays appear on the homepage

Administration

• 2 admin levels: super-admin or admin/moderator
• On-going moderation:
  • Title, description and tags edition
  • Post / comment suppression
• Users profiles edition
• Create / de-activate / delete a user
• Create multiple accounts at a time
• User history log (creation / activation / suppression)
• Excel export of the users
• 1-click creation / modification of groups, teams, news wires
• Assign users to teams, groups and news wires with name/team/group filters
• Accept / refuse access request to private groups
• Enable/disable HTTPS secured access
• Stats :
  • Recent activity (with monthly archives)
  • Annual activity (with annual archives)
  • User activation rate, with pictures, recently connected, who have published
  • Most active groups
  • Activity by teams
  • Most active users
  • Graphic: number of readers / clicks on daily emails
  • Most clicked suggestions
  • Google Analytics integration
  • Suggestions: email reading / click rates

This list is extremely extensive and indigestible, while ergonomics consist in hiding features and only making them visible when necessary.
We begin with simple uses: publish, comment, like. Then, more advanced ones: edit, share, filters research…

If you need to be convinced that this list of features did not destroy the simplicity of YoolinkPro, feel free to test our service or to ask for an online demo.

PS: some features have a [P] next to them, indicating that they are part of the Customization Pack; others have an [F], indicating they are part of the Enhanced Feed Pack.
PPS: YoolinkPro is a SaaS solution, compatible with all browsers (including IE6).

Corporate social networks have been a hot topic for several years now and even though the industry remains young, there are several major companies that successfully harnessed the power of social media. And yet some misconceived ideas are still around. Here is a quick review of the best bad ideas people may have, and why they are wrong.

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Enterprise 2.0 is never about features, it is always about adoption. Projects never fail by lack of bells and whistles. Lack of interest by end users explains most of 2.0 failures. So project managers should be obsessed with one single question: how do I make users want to use my 2.0 service?

We tried to give some answers in a short 5-step guide. Last month we talked with Bertrand Dupperin about adoption and what he calls “Social routines”. “Social Routines” are about giving social reflexes to teams, it’s about helping people to use new services such as micro-blogging by providing them with clear use cases. Total freedom is often scary for users, so you have to give guidelines so they can invent their own way to use the software in their daily jobs.

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Freedom is a scary thing. No limit, no boundary, everything’s possible. It’s definitely not something we are used to; we have to cope with barriers all the time, whether physical or social. It’s true in life, and it’s also true in social software.

Enterprise 2.0 is all about breaking down the barriers and sharing knowledge. It offers unprecedented freedom in information management and in social connections. Yet when project managers face such unlimited possibilities, instead of harnessing them, they tend to get scared and try to return to old paradigms: “no, this has to be only limited only to my sales team, no one else should be able to see it even if they try” or “I can’t let people sort things themselves, I want to control the structure of information completely and build a logical structure”. And who’s paying the price for that? The end users.

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Just as a piece of context: YoolinkPro has been on the market for more than a year. We managed to work with all types of businesses, from large companies (Decathlon, BNP or RATP) to SME (Ziki, 360°), from industrial companies (SPF Diana) to consulting companies (Groupe Alpha).

We have noticed that companies are increasingly interested by corporate social networks, but we’ve also noticed that they  rarely know how and where to start. What should they do first? How will the network be deployed internally ? What matters when it comes to picking a solution? How to be sure it’s going to work ?

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Gil Yehuda’s Enterprise 2.0 Blog recently hosted/animated a really interesting discussion about 2.0 tools for SME. It started with “Why wikis should be a standard workplace tool” and continued on “Enterprise Microsharing vs. Wikis”. The cool thing about this discussion is that many different players from the industry brought their views on the topic.

For most of them Wikis and Microsharing are working hand-in-hand to improve the way companies are working. As Michael Idinopulos from SocialText said : “Every organization has both sets of needs, regardless of size. By integrating the two capabilities, companies get the best of both worlds: the ability to collaborate on enduring artifacts and talk about them at the same time.”

Yet I have trouble totally agreeing on our main target, i.e. SME employing less than 50 people. Those guys have to focus on their business-as-usual and have to go for the lower training-cost & maintaining-cost. They can’t pick several services. We also understood that they probably need more to bring back to their team information and knowledge they found on-line than to fix internal knowledge. Click here for the whole comment.

People that commented on Gil’s Blog are from different background, target different type of customers and address different markets. So I think it explains why we have such different views.

Yet I think it is a great sign for the industry that service providers have such different views and that they openly discuss them. It takes several people to evangelize and actually create some value for a market!

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.