Fogbeam Labs The FogBlog

If you're a regular follower of this blog (and we know you are, so don't try to lie about it. We have hidden CCTV camera footage and everything), you'll have heard us talk about the projects we're working on. Yes, we said "projects" and not "products." That's because we are an Open Source Company and the F/OSS projects we sponsor will ultimately form the foundation for our product offering(s).

And while we're still working on exactly which features and what tech will go into which product, and thinking about naming and branding for our commercial offerings, we'd like to take a few minutes to tell you about one of our projects. Quoddy is our enterprise social networking project, and we are very excited about it. "So," you may be asking yourself, "why do I need an enterprise social network, what is it good for?" Well, we're glad you asked, and hang around for a little while and we'll tell you all about it.

For starters, an enterprise social network allows members of your organization to connect with each other, and define the nature of their relationships with each other, and to search/browse their colleagues to find people with similar interests, or people with specific skills needed to solve a problem, or simply to communicate "in the open" in a way that encourages collaboration and those serendipitous conversations that often lead to amazing innovations.

But this is true of most of the products in this space. That's a cool feature of ESN's in general, but it's not what makes Quoddy unique. Used in this manner, an ESN is a fairly superficial additional communications channel, and it may not be obvious how it is superior to email or other communications mediums.

Where we are going with Quoddy is towards a much deeper level of integration between the people, documents, workflows and applications in your enterprise. Quoddy allows you to funnel communications from other people, output from disparate applications, documents and content which may be spread across content repositories, and business events (and associated workflows) and put all of your most important messages right at your fingertips. With Quoddy you can subscribe to messages from, for example, the Sales Entry System and set criteria to define which messages you see... so if you are the Sales Manager and you want to see the message anytime a sales person on your team closes a deal above (or below) a pre-defined amount, or a deal to a certain customer, etc., you can have it. This is part of the foundation of the Fogbeam Labs approach to Real Time Business Intelligence and only one of the incredibly exciting things we are hacking away on over here.

To whet your appetite here are some (very) preliminary screen-shots of Quoddy in action:

In short, with Quoddy and sister projects from Fogbeam Labs, you will finally be able to truly realize the vision of a Digital Nervous System and provide the base required to achieve real business agility.