Reconsidering Social Networks for Enterprise Communication Services

Social networking applications leverage valuable information from social graphs and integrate communication capabilities to offer new services. However, currently, these applications are limited to communication capabilities such as click-to-call or click-to-conference. Once the communication session is established the social context and the communication context are not integrated in these services. For social network communication services such integration permits new and novel user services. Further, enabling those services in the enterprise context will enhance social networks as a communication and collaboration tool in enterprises. In this paper, we look at such services and argue that social network applications and enterprise social networking communication applications have some fundamental differences. We discuss new notions such as transient relationships, domain separation, user views, and several other issues that need to be addressed for enabling new social networking communication services for enterprises. We present a model that addresses these issues and describe our prototype implementation with a use case example.