Watch the Scope: Who Can See What

When using or deploying a social networking application, it's very important to ask the question: who can see what. We deployed an items of interest reporting tool where each report was made up of individual activities. That was cool because the tool allowed users to search and tag individual activities. But most people come from a back ground where these IOI reports are private to the group that reads them or the person the reports are submitted to. So, they just assumed that the activities in this new tool did the same thing. Not so. Everyone could see the activities.

So when deploying a tool, ask the question: given each object the tool manages: wiki's, blogs, documents, activities, bookmarks, etc - who can see what by default. In today's social networking tools the bias is to make everything as accessible as possible. However, most users in the enterprise have been using tools that are closed by default. That's a very big change and can create some serious problems.