Social media networks like Facebook have revolutionized the way we communicate with family and friends. But in the corporate world, Facebook may be frowned upon, even blocked at the corporate firewall. Using Facebook at work is generally considered "unproductive". But now there's a way to use the communication and collaborative capabilities of Facebook in the corporate world, albeit through a different platform.

MangoSpring, a Seattle-based company with a development team in Pune, India, is offering a social platform called MangoApps, that offers the best of both worlds. A CIO in Mumbai who uses this tool says it combines the "fun element of Facebook with the seriousness of an enterprise app, through a simple interface."

MangoSpring is essentially adding a Social Layer on top of enterprise apps -- so far they have done this for email, CRM, and Office documents -- on a social intranet platform called MangoApps. The company is also working with Indian customers to integrate HR and other enterprise apps with their social collaboration platform.

MangoSpring, founded in 2007, has 3,000 customers in the US and Europe, which are mostly small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

In an exclusive tele-interview with InformationWeek, Vishwa Malhotra, Co-Founder & CTO, MangoSpring explained the changing workplace trends, and how his company is responding to the new requirements of today's workforce.

"We observed a trend in enterprises where multiple siloed applications were being used for communications and collaboration. Enterprises were using a separate application for email, another for instant messaging, one for project management and another for task management. This siloed approach actually hinders productivity. But now the trend is to have collaboration and communications on one platform. And that's why we evolved our solution into a single collaborative product," said Malhotra.

The company initially had an enterprise instant messaging product that later evolved to a broader enterprise communication platform. Today it has become an enterprise social collaboration and networking product.

Malhotra admits that the inspiration came after observing Facebook's success story with consumers. And likewise with Linkedin and Twitter.

Applications

Malhotra says MangoSpring has a roadmap and will continually evolve its products. For now it is offering MangoApps its enterprise social collaboration platform + social intranet. This enables employees to collaborate and share information in a secure environment. The interface is very similar to Facebook. External entities such as partners and customers can also participate through this platform. MangoApps offers a suite of enterprise applications that include document management, project management, task management, idea management, knowledge management, instant messaging, micro-blogging, video collaboration etc. It is an integrated, modular, multi-tiered solution. And it can be hosted and managed in MangoSpring's data center, or by customers on-premise, or on a private cloud.

Then there's Social Email, by way of Ignite, a plug-in for MS Outlook. Ignite links your Outlook email with SharePoint or some other data repository. It simplifies the process of saving email attachments to SharePoint -- or picking up files from SharePoint and attaching these to email. When attaching files to internal email messages, one can simply drag the file from the central repository (shown in a window) into the body of the message. A link to file is included in the mail -- the actual file is not attached. This saves bandwidth and prevents users from storing copies of the same file in their Inboxes. It also obviates the need to use file sharing services and gets round the company file size limitation for attachments. And of course, it reduces the overhead of archived mail on the Exchange server.

An application called Tandem makes it easier for users to share and collaborate on MS Office documents. Traditionally, a group of users working on a proposal create multiple versions of the document, and these need to be consolidated. And then, one needs to deal with multiple revisions made by each user (which version is the latest?) And users need to remember where they stored their files, as there are multiple options for storage available today.

Tandem brings collaborative features to Microsoft Office. Users can work on the same file in real-time. Since documents are stored on the cloud, only a single copy of the file exists at all times. Changes made by users are reflected immediately. Tandem can also retain multiple versions of the file if required. And it incorporates comments, discussions and annotations from users, in the document itself.

Finally, there's Nexus, an app for Social CRM. It is a social layer built on top of CRM applications such as Salesforce.com, Oracle-Siebel, and Microsoft Dynamics. There is a roadmap for supporting more CRM packages informs Malhotra.

Challenges

While MangoSpring's customers are largely from the SME segment, Malhotra informs that large enterprises are also taking to this platform.  But there are a set of challenges.
"A common discussion is integration. Customers ask how do we integrate with existing business systems? Then there is another challenge wherein customers already have multiple solutions for collaboration, communication, project management, inventory management, HR etc. So our challenge is to build a business use case where Mango apps either replaces one or more of these existing systems and gives a simpler user interface --  or it integrates with them," said Malhotra.

Another challenge is deciding the location of the data. For instance, for an HR application, the customer must decide if the HR data continues to reside in the current system and accessed through a MangoApps interface, or does it reside in MangoApps entirely.
Large customers who have made investments in traditional enterprise apps like SAP and Oracle, are likely to just use MangoApps as a social collaboration platform that draws data from the enterprise applications and offers an integrated view. But eventually, some of these enterprises may move their data and email to the MangoApps platform because of its simple interface, unified view and useful collaborative features.

Traditional makers of enterprise apps such as SAP and IBM-Lotus are not going to wait for that to happen. They have also added a social layer on top of their apps, offering a Facebook-like interface, with a unified view by way of the activity streams. Just look at SAP StreamWork or IBM Connections and compare those with MangoApps. InformationWeek has reported about IBM Connections and SAP StreamWork in recent stories on this site.