Social work: WorkLight brings Facebook to the corporate world
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/19/2007 3:15:00 PM
WorkLight Inc. has unveiled a method for giving corporate workers the ability to use the interactive communications capabilities inherent to the popular Facebook Web service without putting company data at risk.
The new solution—dubbed WorkBook—is an addition to the WorkLight 2.0 software platform currently in use by Global 500 companies. Worklight 2.0 offers ways of extracting data from corporate systems and delivering it to users via Web 2.0 tools like personalized homepages or RSS feeds.
Workbook will allow workers to interact with colleagues using the hugely popular Facebook service, while eliminating the security issues that have constantly dogged organizations looking to leverage and embrace the social networking revolution, WorkLight claims.
Facebook is the pre-eminent consumer social networking application on the Internet, with more than 50 million current subscribers and growth of more than 200,000 new visitors per day. A recent Forrester Research study found that 78 percent of IT organizations are concerned with the employee-driven, unsanctioned use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. With the proliferation of social networking applications, enterprises are faced with a choice: either outlaw popular utilities such as Facebook, instant messaging, etc., or embrace the change by leveraging the inherent networking functionality offered by these tools.
WorkBook for the enterprise lets employees securely use Facebook to:
• Search for colleagues by name, location, department, project and area of expertise;
• Connect with peers using familiar Facebook capabilities;
• View up-to-date, corporate-specific information about peers such as status, department, role and location; and
• Receive general and personalized company news directly from a Facebook news feed.
In addition, Workbook provides employers with:
• Secure provisioning that ensures the application can be used only by authorized employees;
• Information security: corporate-related information is visible only to employees;
• Compliance with existing security policies: enterprise security integration authenticates WorkBook users via corporate authentication facilities and supports single sign-On; and
• Integration with the company's directory or applications to provide information to Facebook profiles.
"Enterprise employees are using Facebook in today's workplace whether employers like it or not," said Shahar Kaminitz, CEO and founder of WorkLight. “With WorkBook, enterprises can rest assured that when workers use Facebook, the corporate data remains safe and secure, and the application is being used as a communication tool—not as an impediment to productivity."
