Facebook adds enterprise application

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 16 Nov 2007 at 12:28

Alfresco, an open-source content management firm, has integrated its enterprise software into the Facebook platform, the first such merger of technologies according to the company.

Facebook has been been greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm by organisations, with some seeing it as a security threat and unwelcome distraction for its employees while others have been working to leverage its popularity as part of their own communications.

Alfresco is clearly banking on the latter path, and using the APIs and custom markup language published by Facebook in May has integrated its CMS with the popular social networking site.

According to Alfresco, this integration makes publishing enterprise content to Facebook as controlled, secure and auditable as publishing to a corporate website.

"While social networking websites have typically been perceived as attractive to a predominately younger consumer market, if leveraged properly, these services may provide the enterprise market with a potentially powerful and cost-effective solution to its collaboration and content management needs," says Nicole Engelbert, lead analyst, Vertical Markets Technology, Datamonitor.

"With Facebook, companies can engage with their customers, partners and employees to share social connections as well as content, and track what is going on in the enterprise," comments John Newton, CTO of Alfresco Software.

"For example, our new ECM-enabled access to Facebook lets an organisation take the latest news or catalog information from inside the corporation and easily publish it both internally and externally to keep stakeholders informed."