| This is the first post in what will become a series of entries on the sorts of collaborative technologies that companies use for their employees to keep each other in the loop. Every company approaches this decision with a unique level of comfort and desired openness. For example, some organizations are fine with public solutions like Facebook; others prefer restricted, enterprise-grade services like Yammer or Jive; and still others are most comfortable with traditional Outlook email. |
To start off this series, I posed some questions to a representative from AMD about the kinds of technologies they use and why.
1. What specific service(s) does AMD currently use for maintaining collaboration and correspondence between employees?
[AMD] We still work primarily through email and SharePoint but have been slowly transitioning to Jive as our enterprise social network.
2. When did AMD start using this tool?
[AMD] May 2012.
3. Is there a reason why they chose this tool (or tools) for that purpose over its competitors?
[AMD] We did a pretty comprehensive analysis of the tools that met our requirements and the finalists were Jive and Newsgator (add-on to SharePoint). Jive was an overall better fit. If SharePoint 2013 had been out we might have just used the built-in social networking features although they aren’t terribly strong. We couldn’t consider solutions like Yammer as our information must be hosted in AMD data centers and we can’t use cloud solutions.
4. Would you say that the implementation of this tool has been largely a positive or negative move? Why?
[AMD] It has been largely positive but unfortunately it introduced yet another collaboration tool into our environment. Many users also are distrustful of social networks, even business oriented ones, and have a difficult time of breaking out of the habit of using email for all communications.
5. What was AMD’s collaboration and correspondence solution prior to adopting their current service, and why did they make the switch?
[AMD] Our primarily collaboration platform was SharePoint 2007 but it (and SharePoint 2010) had not real enterprise social networking capabilities.
6. Would you say this is an industry-specific tool, or would just about any corporation under the sun benefit from using it?
[AMD] It is definitely not industry specific and generic to any company for use.
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