Alfresco formally launched its Facebook integration yesterday.   The press release goes into why we think that this is significant and what we think the future of the enterprise and social networking has in store for us all.

Some highlights:

Employees are increasingly communicating on social-networking platforms – outside the control of the corporate IT department. Corporations must choose either to ban social software use or to harness the potential to communicate more effectively with their community of customers, partners and employees.

From an enterprise perspective, organizations must have the ability to publish to a Facebook audience as effectively as to a Web site audience. From an employee perspective, forward-looking enterprises believe that social networking provides a ready-made knowledge-management platform for their workers, which will increase adoption rates to the levels that knowledge management was always meant to achieve.

Agree or disagree, social networks will/are having an affect on the enterprise.  Phil Windley, pointed out yesterday on BTL, the power in integration between search and facebook type social network platforms.  He said,

Facebook has more than a good record of my personal traits and attributes. They also know about my relationships.  Would you be willing to reveal your social network to Yahoo! or Google? For most of us, the answer depends on what we’d get in return. How about friend recommendations on products?

Imagine a system that knew what your friends were buying and ordered product search results accordingly. You could tweak it, perhaps, with information about who’s recommendation you trusted in what categories.

Now an ECM could also take advantage of this, sharing your content with your friends, and others in your extended networks.  Your personalized search engine could be pulling back content target at your employees, customers and partners, placing content at the finger tips of those whom you trust, associate with and sell to.

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