Even though Sharing at Work hasn’t been quite as frantically busy in 2009 as it was in 2008, people still keep Googling their way here to check out the archives. It’s a good practice to track the topics that are drawing the most public interest so we can figure out which powerful themes in enterprise collaboration continue to capture the imagination.cl

Today’s recap is an effort to escape the blogging echo chamber of hot new posts on hot new topics and instead revisit the resonant themes that have come up again and again throughout the year. Below are the biggest draws to this site for September along with explanations and links to the relevant posts.

Hot topic #1: Internal Facebooks

Sharing at Work post: Setting up an internal Facebook might just solve your company’s communications and engagement problems

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

Facebook is the most successful social network on the market, so it’s natural that users would want to try something like it at work and that admins would be looking at ways to provide it. There’s a great reason to do so – expert location. We’ll get to that later, but for right now you want to consider Mark Trapp’s caveat that attempting to mimic the Facebook interface might actually confuse users:

… don’t try to shoehorn one service to do something it’s not designed to because it’s “more familiar.” When you start comparing things to well-known analogues, you get smacked with the uncanny valley problem, where the hinderance to adoption is not ease of use or solving a workflow problem, but people thinking there’s a problem because it’s not 100% like the tool it’s being compared to. – Mark Trapp via Friendfeed

Despite Mark’s warnings, there’s still great value in the idea of bringing a Facebook-style platform to your organization. The two most common themes I’ve observed when profiling other companies’ enterprise collaboration efforts are the internal facebook (Wachovia, Lockheed, Deloitte, and more) and the definitions wiki (Wachovia again, development teams everywhere).

Hot topic #2: SharePoint microblogging

Sharing at Work post: Streamline your team’s updates with microblogs

Image via CrunchBase

Not yet as large as Facebook, Twitter is undeniably the hottest social network going right now. People around the world are flocking to this microblogging platform to share personal stories, keep up with current events, and connect with other professionals in their respective industries. Couple that with the Microsoft’s SharePoint rolling out across the enterprise collaboration landscape and you’ve got a lot of users and admins looking to integrate Twitter-style tools into their not-quite-realtime SharePoint platforms.

My two recommendations for this particular problem are Newsgator Social Sites and Yammer. Newsgator hypersocializes the entire SharePoint/ MOSS experience by adding in microblog-style activity streams to each user’s dashboard (screenshot) along with the ability for coworkers to comment and reshare the updates. Yammer takes a standalone private microblogging network that can be integrated with your SharePoint site using RSS widgets and MS Outlook integration. Power microbloggers are going to want to run a desktop microblogging client such as TweetDeck or an internal enterprise equivalent in order to stay on top of every single conversation on the company’s network.

Hot topic #3: Expert location

Sharing at Work post: Presentation: New Wave Collaboration And Enterprise 2.0

This trend is sure to grow as analysts continue to dig into it. This is the true power behind the “internal Facebook” model mentioned above: just in time knowledge management. We’ll keep doing our best to capture knowledge as it’s typed out (see SharePoint microblogging above) but we’ll never be able to replace experts when it comes to solving critical problems with no time to spare. When in doubt, call in the experts. A robust internal directory with up to date work histories and project histories makes it easier to find out who knows the answers you need… RIGHT NOW. For a great dive into expert location, check out this amazing presentation (hat tip @ITSInsider) from T Systems in Germany. Skip to slide 8 if you’re impatient:

Hot topic #4: Django wikis

Sharing at Work post: Building a Wiki using Django – Excellent #bcmem presentation by @bkmontgomery

Image by hoerner_brett via Flickr

This trend combines two growing movements: Wikis are a powerful way for groups to share information and work together. Django is a Python-based web programming framework that is growing in popularity. To learn more about wikis I have to recommend consultant Stewart Mader. If you want your dev team to look into building their own wiki via Django, you’d do well to start with Brad Montgomery’s examples from the article linked above.

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