Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Connections Outside the Organization

I was thinking about this yesterday, and after having the discussion, it was suggested to me to bring this up to IBM as an idea to consider.  The issue with taking the wonderful tools provided in Connections is that it is really designed around being deployed as an internal set of tools.  There is not user self-service in the product for things like, password reset, registration or inclusion in the solution, etc. like you find with public social tools.  What if the Connections tool set (Blogs, Wikis, Communities, Files, etc…) were to not utilize just Profiles as the user repository?  What if we could allow Connections to use Facebook, for example, as the user repository.  Trust the FB session, like other FB apps, and have FB allow the users to modify their own user information and keep it up to date on their own.  FB already provides user self-service.  Connections will still control authorization to data, security, all the things we have come to expect from an enterprise class solution from IBM would still be handled in the app.  This would make deploying Connections into an extranet much easier as we would not have to handle the user management, but leverage the user management provided in a public social network.  Just a thought, but I wonder what others in the community think before trying to speak with anyone in a meaningful way about this… let me know!

3 comments:

  1. Something similar to GroupOn?G Groupon allows th FB log-in credentials.

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  2. Anon... YES! I would love to see it where we can use the amazing tools LC3 gives us, the security the enterprise expects, but turn the user self-service and authentication over to the networks where people are already established. Why make my own directory of people when FB (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) has already done it for me?? I need to make an idea-jam... off I go.

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  3. Here is the link to the submission on IdeaJam. Promote if you agree!

    http://ideajam.net/IdeaJam/P/ij.nsf/0/F7A0B0B80D58114F8625782D005655B2?OpenDocument

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