Social business systems connect social elements such as micro-blogs, community spaces, and social network sites with existing collaboration and unified communications elements to provide both management and employees with a complete dynamic view of the organization. As collaboration moves beyond email to social, the opportunity exists for this unified collaboration platform to become the preferred place for all workers to “live.”

Social business systems have been on a rapid evolutionary path in the past three years. While they are now converging to a standardized set of functionalities, they may have quite different heritages—unified communications platforms, forums and expertise locators, cloud-shares, activity streams, site-based collaboration, enterprise system modules, or various combinations of these. In this paper, we first explore the strategic options and requirements for implementing social business systems, and then consider how well such systems can pull in content from multiple repositories and lift it into the more open collaboration environment, while protecting its security and context.