Studentforce.com and Coaxing Social Enterprise Adoption by Students

Ed Schlesinger product designer and CEO gave me an depth demo of of StudentForce.com his companies Social Enterprise Portal built on the Salesforce.com platform for and by Students by way of configuration (not by coding).

A college targeted application a fitting test of Parker Harris force.com platform, where a little known secret is designed for, few IT business developers code software, they write specs for others to code (or now can configure Salesforce.com).

But Ed’s demo also left me wanting to explore more deeply how a social enterprise app is self limiting in gaining product adoption and thus limiting Salesforce.com’s growth compared to platforms designed to focus on coaxing consumer adoption or hardcore coding business software with traditional software development tools.

Attend any CS lecture at Stanford, sit at the back, and you’ll be struck how much light-touch interaction takes place on devices during a lecture (chat, im, status update).

Broadly attention is split 4 ways. Facebook, Google docs, Wikipedia or Reference Materials, and students taking notes the old fashioned way. Virtually no one is signed into Stanford’s student admin portal https://axess.stanford.edu/

Just stating the obvious, the Axess portal based around Oracle was probably sold to Stanford’s CIO and including representatives from HR and Admissions. Yet to gain viral adoption, Facebook and Google tease apart applications into very useful social functions (where the people are at). This coaxes adoption by way of sharing social interactions.

This brought me back to Ed’s demo, StudentForce needs to sell to college CIOs, yet users come from consumer applications. Why then is architecture for integration not more granular about data with promulgated privacy controls, and automatically self linking by first replicating an interface then using that interface.

Probably because Parker Harris and other cutting architects working up new patterns didn’t have exposure to microbiology, java script and perhaps privacy controls in social sharing patterns evolved today.

Gary Flake, CEO & Founder, Clipboard, Inc., aka @flakenstein was showing @clipboard service at Google and happened to clip a JavaScript calculator image including its meta links, and guess what, the calculator it worked in different system without any integration coding, simply by copy and paste. Gary is author of the computational beauty of nature (microbiology influence?) 

And innovating new federated data propagation sharing patterns @WardCunningham’s world’s smallest wiki project. My sense is we are very, close to a canonically disruptive data integration technology where data is teased apart from systems to coax adoption by granular sharing by federation. 

And federated data may require you grant permissions to share your data with business developers like Studentforce.com. Coaxing new adoption sharing patterns in social enterprise products for students, supply chain, food traceability and other previously ERP like systems, similar to the early adoption effect of Facebook.

Coda: Food safety traceability data hoping across multiple critical identifiers, may end up with a patented process to structure a whole chain http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2012/1/26/whole-chain-traceability-a-successful-research-funding-strat.html

(Source: appexchange.salesforce.com)

VRM | The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge | Doc Searls

VRM is reverse CRM right?

(Source: Wikipedia)

Whole Chain Traceability, pulling a Kobayshi Maru building the next generation of enterprise connected consumer apps with polyglot technologies.

Pardalis is banking on granular information sharing through common point authoring of immutable objects:

My opinion, this may lead to a path for Enterprise Internet to innovate new business models as Consumer Internet has from monetizing social data via advertising.

2003 Pardalis patent entitled: “Informational object authoring and distribution system” on December 30, 2003. US Patent 6,671,696 - Pardalis) covering:

A typical immutable informational object and its contents that are authored, distributed and maintained by the present informational object authoring and distribution system comprise a unique identifier that designates the informational object, as well as one or more immutable data elements, each of which itself is identified by a corresponding unique identifier. The informational object may also contain other data, such as formatting data, permissions data, and the like. The data elements that are associated with a particular informational object are typically stored in a separate file system from the informational object, and are linked via the use of pointers, which comprise the data element unique identifiers.

Pardalis blog post has with more info.