Connectbeam For Social Computing in the Enterprise

Connectbeam has announced the launch of version 2.0 of their social computing appliance. It looks like an interesting approach to get social bookmarking and social networking inside the enterprise. They have a 5 minute tour of the product.

It is great that the Connectbeam tagging and social bookmarking includes websites both inside and outside the firewall. We need to increasingly be aware that lots of great content and information lives outside our firewalls and should be incorporated as part of an enterprise knowledge base/search.

The problem I have with Connectbeam is getting it integrated with our document management system. Without that content most of our firm's internal content would be missing from the Connectbeam system. They have connectors to Google's search appliance, FAST search and Transfer's FSP search engine. None of these have been shown to integrate well with our document management system

I do like their Live Profiles, that dynamically reflects a person's area of interest and expertise. As you tag information, those tags get reflected in your profile. As you join groups, that group information gets shown on your profile.