Basic Social Services for basic enterprise social software

Basic Content Services focuses on the most basic services that an enterprise needs to manage its content, such as library services (version control, check-in/out), access control, metadata management and search. BCS can be seen as a less complex and less expensive alternative to ECM suites which are typically too expensive to be rolled out to all coworkers. A similar approach could be interesting for enterprise social software.



There are a number of social services that are absolutely necessary for efficient communication and collaboration and which must be considered as basic:

• Presence - Presence information communicates the availability of an individual – if the individual currently can or want to communicate (synchronously) with other individuals. A presence service enables authorized users to create, modify and/or view the presence information of an individual.


• Profiles - A profile is information associated with a specific individual user or group. The information in the profile is supplied and managed by the user (or group). A profile service enables authorized users to create, modify and/or view profiles.


• Social Networks - A social network is a set of relationships (ties) between individuals and/or groups (nodes). The relationships (ties) can be of various kinds. A social network service enables authorized users to create, modify and/or view nodes and ties in a social network.

These services should ideally be a part of the enterprise IT infrastructure and possible to integrate in any application. The services would typically build upon and extend the information about the users and groups that are stored in a central directory such as Microsoft’s Active Directory.