What is Enterprise Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking systems have become enormously popular on the internet in recent years. Enterprise bookmarking is just beginning to take hold. As bookmarking continues to grow in popularity it is important to distinguish between the two forms. The key distinctions between Social and Enterprise bookmarking as outlined in this blog.

To start, lets define the difference between social bookmarking and enterprise bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. (from Wikipedia-Social_bookmarking).

Enterprise bookmarking is a method for employees to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of data objects. It is a method of tagging and linking data objects using tag metadata (an expended set of tags) to capture knowledge about data in remote data stores. It collects and indexes these tag profiles in a knowledgebase and search engine. (from Wikipedia-Jumper_2.0)

Social bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Enterprise bookmarks are typically private, indexed in a web-infrastructure server residing behind the firewall. Users can share knowledge tags with specified people or groups, shared only inside specific networks or people, in a similar fashion. The primary difference is that they contain specific knowledge and information that organizations consider proprietary and are not shared on the public Internet.

Social bookmarks use tag clouds. A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.

Enterprise bookmarks use tag profiles. A tag profile is an expanded set of tag fields that capture a wealth of information about the data. These tag fields consist of non-hierarchical keywords, but also apply description tags, hierarchical category tags, global name tags, location tags, link tags, annotation tags, derivative tags, comment tags, and ontology tags. The tags are created informally and personally by end users. Other users can add knowledge or information to an existing tag profile so that a tag profile can grow with knowledge organically over time.

There are a number of Enterprise Bookmarking platforms available.

1. The clear leader and pioneer in the space is Jumper Networks.
They are an open source platform you can download for free.
You can learn more about Jumper at jumpernetworks.com

2. A re-packeged social bookmarking platform is Cogenz.
They charge a commercial license per user.
You can find them at: cogenz.com

3. There are a number of all-in-one platform such as Jive and Connectbeam
They charge a commercial license and are also just keyword tags.
You can get Jive at jivesoftware.com
You can get Connectbeam at connectbeam.com