Here is some potentially welcome news for any individual training departments out there (or small businesses) who have considered diving into enterprise social software for social and collaborative learning or otherwise, but have held off so far due to financial contraints.  SocialText - a leading enterprise social software platform provider - just announced last week that they would now be offering fully SaaS access to their platform (up to 50 users) for free.   No strings attached.   Their hope is that giving away access at this level will let departments within organizations feel comfortable experimenting with their platform. When and if adoption catches on, it will be easier to prove a business case for either purchasing a larger SaaS account or transitioning to an on-premise appliance.
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I recently had a briefing with the folks at Lithium, an enterprise social software platform provider that specializes in customer communities.   During the conversation, they introduced me to a very intriguing way of capturing the health of a corporate community. Lithium has recently turned their experience and expertise with online communities into a publically available tool for measuring the health of online communities: the Community Health Index.   They compare this index to well known measures like the FICO score and Body Mass Index (BMI).   Their hope is that the Community Health Index will become an industry standard way of measuring and predicting vibrant communities.
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At the end of this month we will be releasing our important new study on the future of corporate training: High Impact Learning Practices: The Operating Guide to the Modern Enterprise Learning Function. It is a companion piece to our High Impact Learning Organization study.   This report is the result of 9 months of investigation into how modern High Impact Learning Organizations are thriving in the face of the tranformative forces for change in today's organizations and evolving to meet the chaning needs of their workforces.   I have had the pleasure of presenting highlights of our findings to the learning organizations in several companies recently, including Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell. The folks at Booz Allen Hamilton submitted a few questions to me afterwards which I would like to share my answers to here: Are communities of practice a common element of the (social) learning environments/programs in the organizations that you have surveyed? Yes – although maybe not explicitly named as such.
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What do you use your mobile phone for? Odds are increasing that you use it for much more that simply making phone calls.   Today’s mobile devices are now platforms for e-mail, messaging, surfing the web, multimedia entertainment, gaming, personal organization, wayfinding (GPS), and even shopping. You would be hard pressed to find an area of personal technology experiencing as much intensive innovation right now as in mobile.   Mobile devises of all sorts are now ubiquitous.   Smartphones and netbooks are changing our expectations of what we can and should be able to access or do – in the palm of our hands and away from our desks.
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