Communities of practice have been around a while, and so has the software platforms to support them. They were one of the first inroads of social software within the enterprise. I recently talked with Eric Sauve, CEO and Co-Founder, at Tomoye, a Communities of Practice Platform. Tomoye has been in this space for 8 years. Ecco is their flagship product and they are planning a new release later this quarter. As Eric said, they started long before it was cool to discuss the social dimension of the enterprise. Their market remains within the enterprise but they have now incorporated many of the innovations of web 2.0 into their platform. They have also worked to bring these new features in a way that reflects their relatively long experience with the business side of social software.

Many of the new enterprise 2.0 tools are focused on team collaboration and project management and execution. Tomoye is different as it maintains its focus on the extended group/ community collaboration that is more theme based that project based. The wikipedia defines the concept of communities of practice as “the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.” Sounds like a great task for enterprise 2.0.

As Tomoye has made the transition into enterprise 2.0, that have brought their process approach. While the platform supports broader themes, it is also designed to help participants reach answers and network. Eric contrasted social forums with no focus on one extreme and content management systems with no engagement on the other. Tomoye provides more structure and support for facilitation to better enable communities to reach decisions that align with business goals and policies.

The buzz around web 2.0 has created a better educated consumer within the enterprise for what they offer. It has also set higher expectations for what community of practice platforms should provide. Web 2.0 puts more control into the hands of users and increases transparency. In some cases, Tomoye has renamed existing functions to fit the web 2.0 terms and in other cases they have realigned functions and added new functionality. In the first instance, Tomoye has had wiki like functionality for some time as part of its collaborative discussion features. Now they have explicitly called this out.

In second instance, they have added features such as the ability to rate documents, questions, and answers to allow for more user involvement. They support blogs and added the ability to automatically embed discussion items within blogs to generate more discussion. There is also social networking, expertise location, tagging, page rank, open APIs, and syndication.

Eric showed me show it works. The interface includes a community home page and three additional tabs. First, there are documents and videos. The documents include wikis and allow for discussion around the documents. The videos work similar to YouTube. The next tab brings in questions and answers. You can see them by themes, people, and most recent. For each Q&A pair, you can tag them, subscribe to updates, email them, edit, and blog them, as well as mark as a favorite. You can see the rankings of answers, as well as who are the most highly rated suppliers of answers.

The next tabs brings experts and members by themes, areas, titles, location and offers a link to the Facebook style personal profiles of individuals. There you find many social networking features including their latest activities, who is in their network, the files they are sharing, the first page of their blog, and their community affiliations. The system is .net based so it hooks with Sharepoint. The open APIs allow for mashup integration.

Tomoye has 250,000 deployed users. They also offer consulting services to help you get started since this is about much more than software. It is nice to see a long time enterprise social platform make the transition to enterprise 2.0.