While many businesses are updating firewall block lists to prevent their employees becoming FaceBook zombies, smart businesses are looking for ways to harness the interest in social networking to make their employees more productive. By going beyond building networks for the sake of it, businesses can increase collaboration and communication between employees with social networks that actually have a point.

Web content management systems often suffer because the people that use them are geographically-distributed and unfamiliar with each other. When employees go home at night, they regularly solve these same problems on FaceBook and MySpace – regularly finding and reconnecting with long lost friends. Bringing that technology and enthusiasm into business hours, can dramatically increase the number of weak ties between people within the business, making it easier to find the skills and knowledge that you need, when it’s needed.

With user adoption being one of the key concerns with any content management system roll-out, providing ways to make people feel more comfortable and welcome in the system is essential to success. This session will look at the techniques used in various social networks and other forms of collaboration software that can enhance user adoption and keep bringing users back to the CMS instead of reverting to emailing Word documents.

Despite the benefits, social networks can very easily become time sinks and distractions, hindering productive work. Finding the right balance between keeping users happy and keeping users on task requires a delicate hand and constant review and improvement. This session will look at what can be done to keep the vampires at bay and focus users on getting work done, without taking all the fun out of work.

Finally, the session will take a look at the various technologies and standards that can help you actually bring this new social world to reality and integrate it with existing systems.