Microsoft is continuing to find ways to integrate social media services into a business user’s routine. A recent entry on the Microsoft Office Labs’ web site suggests the Redmond giant is working on its own version of the popular micro-blogging site Twitter, targeted towards businesses and large corporations. The solution has been christened ‘OfficeTalk’.
The research value of this initiative is high enough to justify the product. In fact, Microsoft says Office Talk has been one of the most popular internal concept tests to date. "Not only was the obvious demonstrated, that people don’t limit microblogging activity to the purely social, but that even an IT managed implementation focused on business productivity can spread quickly across informal networks and create unique collaboration efficiencies and experiences," says the post on the Office Labs web site.
Office Talk is currently termed as a research project focused on learning how people might use social networking tools at work and in what ways both people and organisations realize their value. It has also been opened up to a small group of external testers. Office Labs projects rarely ever make it out of testing, but given the early response, and the popularity of Twitter, it wouldn't be a surprise to see this project go commercial in the near future.
Contrary to general opinion, Microsoft does not seem to be calling out Twitter to a duel in the micro-blogging arena. Although they come from the same family, the nature of their target users are very different. While Twitter is a down-to-the-bone social media tool, OfficeTalk could morph into a collaboration tool and start catering to a variety of needs that a business user might have within an enterprise.
But as it has been for quite a few years now Microsoft seems late to the party – Yammer SocialText, StatusNet, Socialcast and Salesforce's Chatter are all microblogging products used by enterprises currently. The advantage Microsoft has, however, is this is still a nascent market. If OfficeTalk is integrated seamlessly with Microsoft Office or SharePoint then Microsoft stands a good chance of gaining a sizable chunk of the social enterprise pie.