

 Quora+HN for the Enterprise? Beta testing anyone? - JarekS
http://sygitowicz.posterous.com/social-link-file-and-qa-for-your-company

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mbesto
You've got a few competitors here. How would you differentiate?

Yammer - <http://www.yammer.com/>

Chatter (SalesForce.com) - <http://www.chatter.com/>

Jive - <http://www.jivesoftware.com/>

Also, may be worthy to grab one of the StackOverflow sources, pretty it up and
use that!

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JarekS
There are major differences:

1\. System will be open to external parties (customers and partners) - you can
invite people per Topic (see my comment above)

2\. Form factor - Facebook layout is not efficient - we are looking at
something like much better looking HN

3\. Karma and competence profile - we will by (just like HN) building your
competence profile counting karma points and average karma per submission. We
will also find out which topics you are best at.

This will be a system that is built to retain & share knowledge and
experience. We are not building social collaboration (like Yammer).

Social collaboration (quote similar to Chatter but works better) is our other
product - you can check <http://www.discoursehq.com> :)

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mbesto
First off, Discourse looks great!

I have a background working in large tech enterprises. A couple of comments:

> 1\. System will be open to external parties (customers and partners) - you
> can invite people per Topic (see my comment above)

1\. This is very dangerous in the enterprise. The strength (traditionally) is
it's ability to utilize it's own knowledge and share within it's own teams.
Opening up knowledge (and potentially proprietary knowledge) is potentially
dangerous from a legal and a strategy standpoint. For example when you leave a
company they stick a contract in your hands with words like "all knowledge of
business processes, blueprints, etc. cannot be shared"

> 2\. Form factor - Facebook layout is not efficient - we are looking at
> something like much better looking HN

2\. I agree Quora/HN has a great UI, but yammer/chatter are both very
compelling as well.

> 3\. Karma and competence profile - we will by (just like HN) building your
> competence profile counting karma points and average karma per submission.
> We will also find out which topics you are best at.

3\. I think this is a great feature and adds a bit of meritocracy to the
workplace. Unfortunately it also adds some complexity to HR. Let's say I'm a
manager and I have a Senior guy who has 1,000,000 less karma points than a
junior guy under him. They're both in the same competency, do I promote the
Junior guy?

Enterprise ready? Probably not yet, requires a massive culture change. Start-
up/SME ready? Possibly. Good luck, sounds like a good challenge!

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JarekS
ad. 1 - we have a use case of group of companies (4 different companies 1500
people in total). That is why we will have this external user invitation
feature. I think that this could be used for partners and customers in cases
like customer knowledge base (support knowledge base).

ad. 2 - Chatter/yammer has problem with the activity stream (we've discovered
this while working on Discourse and the next version will get rid of that
problem). Activity stream just like in Facebook is ok when you read content
you don't care about (like your network updates about what that had for
breakfast etc.). If you have customer communication or any other important
business communication there is no way that you'll not be frustrated with
facebook-like interface after few days.

ad. 3 - Good point - we are thinking of the value prop for the HR dept. I
think that karma could be a great tool for HR for people development rather
then promotion decisions :)

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zalew
With pleasure. Pls send me invite to: zalew7 at gmail

Pozdrawiam ;)

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JarekS
Awesome - email was sent!

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swah
I was thinking about doing something similar for myself to use, I'd love to
beta test: hugows at gmail.com

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JarekS
Thanks for all the emails I'm getting right now! Please please please if each
person could give me a short info about the company they are working for: \-
how many employees they have? \- which industry?

It would help me a lot! Thanks in advance!

