Tibbr 3.0: Making The Activity Streams Actionable

Tibco, the enterprise infrastructure software company, today announced an upgrade for their enterprise social networking product Tibbr (previous CloudAve coverage). I was very impressed with Tibbr when they launched in January because they brought together people, process and context in a way to drive efficiency in the enterprise workflow. With this release, they are taking it a notch higher by letting users act on the activity stream without moving away from the interface. In order for enterprises to embrace social in a big way, it is important that the activity streams are actionable rather than just getting the relevant actionable intelligence in place.

Some of the interesting features of this release are:

Unified Communications: They have brought in voice, video, screen sharing, whiteboarding, etc. inside Tibbr. This is interesting because Salesforce has already acquired DimDim and they are expected to integrate these features into Chatter soon. The interesting part about this is that it is easy to integrate with any third party services offering similar features as long as they support SIP protocol, essentially opening up the communications to people outside of the organization like partners, customers, etc..
Act on Activity Streams: As I mentioned above, this is interesting from the enterprise point of view and makes social tools more useful. For example, you can approve a purchase order or expense report or order additional inventory without even leaving Tibbr. After integrating business processes into social tools, this is the next iteration where the activity streams are actionable.
Making Legacy Apps Social: The biggest obstacle for enterprises looking to adopt modern technologies like cloud computing, social computing, etc. is the presence of legacy applications in their IT. This version of Tibbr adds a social layer around these applications and making them part of modern day enterprise workflow.
Document Management: This version of Tibbr integrates with document management tools like Sharepoint and others. In other words, this version gives a fresh lease of life to socially inept Sharepoint (relatively speaking). The integration goes beyond the ability to search documents in Sharepoint and adds a two way process. Users can even add and edit documents to Sharepoint sites. It is not restricted to Sharepoint and the architecture is flexible enough to integrate with modern day document management services like Box and others.
Tibbr Communities: Enterprise users always work with communities beyond their organization like partners, customers, etc.. Tibbr communities will allow enterprises to manage multiple communities in a single platform but with the access control expected in the enterprise environment.

Tibco has really heated up the competition in the Social market segment. It will be interesting to see how the competitors respond. I am especially curious to see how Salesforce puts DimDim acquisition to use. Competition in this space has increased the pace of innovation and I am loving it.