We all use Facebook for socializing, interacting with friends/colleagues, expressing our opinions on groups/forums etc, but pretty much all these activities are for fun and leisure. In fact, it’s common for people to brand Facebook as a “fun” site. However, we engage in a lot of similar stuff at work as well, albeit in slightly different form. For example, sending emails or messages to someone at work can be thought of as equivalent of “poking” someone in Facebook environment, signing up for a mail group inside the firm is equivalent to joining a network, Outlook contacts are equivalent to the friends’ list, corporate directory has the kind of information for the employees that Facebook profile has for its users, and so on.

So here is the question: can the firms - especially the small ones and startups - really leverage Facebook for things like corporate directory, emails, twikis and forums? Here are the advantages of doing so:

• Much more cost effective than setting up customized infrastructure to host these applications
• No maintenance and monitoring overhead
• Users are likely to be familiar with Facebook UI/functionality so easy to switch/adopt
• Can host multiple enterprise applications, so that the website becomes one place that people go to for most of their needs
• One place to communicate to both personal and professional contacts

Though there are many positives - cost being the most important one - there are a few obvious downsides as well.

• Reliability, uptime of service. We have seen Facebook website not responding or being very slow based on user load etc. This erratic behavior won’t be acceptable in enterprise environment
• Security concerns: Hosting employee data on Facebook’s server will lead to security concerns.
• Branding: Facebook has a certain branding that can’t be altered. Companies would rather have their own logo on top left instead of Facebook’s.
• Undesired/obscene content on various groups/networks does not suit enterprise environment

Now for the small firms who are willing to live with these limitations, they can still go ahead and use Facebook website - after all it offers a lot of features that they would otherwise have to build/deploy/maintain. Since all these services are available for free on Facebook, the benefits of using Facebook can’t be overlooked even with these limitations.

But there would certainly be many who’d not be willing to compromise on security issue mentioned above, for example. However this inadequacy can actually offer a monetization opportunity for Facebook if they are willing to productize the features on their website!

Facebook “Enterprise Edition”

I think if Facebook platform was available as a standalone platform that could be deployed in another environment, that would solve all the concerns like reliability, security, branding etc. Think of Facebook as a software product that the firms could deploy in a very controlled environment on their own servers inside the firewall, be able to change the branding, have complete control over the applications which are deployed and so on.

This option of course is not as cost effective as using Facebook site as-is, but it would still be lot cheaper than building and deploying all the components like the directory service, email servers, wiki, forums separately and then making all these application to talk to each other.

I think with increasing popularity of Social networking sites, some company or other is going to try this in near future. Even though making websites like Facebook into a product is not trivial, it has significant revenue generating potential that companies like Facebook should look into.

What’s your opinion on using something like Facebook in an enterprise environment?