Blogger: Guy Creese
Yesterday, CCS Principal Analyst Mike Gotta put up a very interesting post on his personal blog (Collaborative Thinking) entitled, "When Work and Social Worlds Collide: Microsoft Outlook, Xobni & Facebook."
To summarize, Xobni ("Inbox" spelled backwards) offers Xobni for Outlook, an Outlook plug-in that shows the e-mail sender's contact information and communications history, as well as displays some e-mail analytics. When Mike installed the latest version of the plug-in (which supports Facebook Connect), Mike discovered, "I now had access to people's information via Xonbi's Facebook Connect application that I could not access normally on Facebook."
This is a classic case of content, identity, and security all colliding--a situation that our clients are asking us about more and more. With people having different personas--e.g., during the weekdays, Bob Smith is an upstanding life insurance underwriter; during the weekends, he's a wild party animal--and content being reused, have our systems kept up in being able to secure the many permutations? (E.g., don't show Bob's weekend persona to his co-workers.) In most cases, the short answer is "No."
This is why installing collaboration systems is difficult--it's not all upside. There are risks. And they're not always apparent to the people who work in the "silos," whether it's in the e-mail group or the identity group or the security group. Today, often the most interesting problems are those that fall between the silos: those that "fall between the cracks." Mike certainly seems to have found one.
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