Dirk Röhrborn is the founder of Communardo where he is involved with Communote, an internal microsharing application. In this interviewFAQ, he provides insights into the application and decisions for its implementation and execution.

Q: Why did Communardo develop a new micro-sharing platform?

A: We have worked extensively with quite a number of social media tools, e. g. open source and enterprise wikis and weblogs, in projects for our clients. We have been using tools like these also internally for many years. However, a lot of very important project team communication cannot be captured. People use (sometimes abuse) e-mail and instant messaging and many good ideas, reasoning behind decisions, risks, problem solutions etc. is buried in mail boxes and IM log files. We wanted to capture these parts of informal communication. We’ve got some very good inspirations from the Wordpress Prologue theme which is in fact a great tool, but we do need a platform with better manageability and scalability. Therefore we developed “Kenmei” which we will now offer as online-service at communote.com.

Q: Why don’t you just use Twitter.com?

A: We love Twitter for personal use and business networking purposes. There is no better communications platform around. However, for our internal project work we rather need a tool that is topic-centric rather than people-centric like twitter. Further, we need confidentiality. Don’t misunderstand me; we are enthusiasts about information sharing and knowledge exchange. But we are also bound to legal agreements with clients that demand confidentiality. Therefore we must use a secure micro-sharing platform either behind the firewall or at least as secured service private to our teams.

Q: Why should busy users use another tool for communications?

A: Good question. People say: “all these users generating own content takes up our time”. But, user generated content is nothing new. If you look at today’s companies you will find many people writing notes into large paper notebooks. Some changed these for a shiny new notebook computer or smart phones and type notes into files, email messages etc. This is all UGC. But it really takes archeological capabilities to find and share important information this way. So what we need is a tool that our colleagues can use to write down their notes into one space easily, ideally using the client of their choice.

Q: What makes communote.com different from other micro-sharing tools?

A: First of all, there is this topic-centric approach that in our opinion fits the needs of internal communication better than a pure people-centric approach. Second, we have invested heavily into the development of the tagging and filtering tools to make sure that every note can be found instantly when needed. Third, we make sure that micro-content can be exported for later processing. RSS can be used to integrate micro-content into news readers and web portals. Further, we added an access control feature as well as LDAP integration to meet enterprise requirements.

Q: How do you use Communote in your own company?

A: Well, mostly in project communications. However, other teams are catching up, such as sales / marketing, HR and finance. One very interesting use is the “IT systems log”. This is a microblog where our technicians are noting any system change and extraordinary event into a microblog rather than another logbook. This makes later analysis and sharing within the team much easier.

Q: When will it be possible to use communote.com?

A: Our team is currently busy with completing the platform and setting up a stable systems environment. We plan to start the public beta-test in November. During the beta-phase we will be introducing a number of new features. The release of the commercial service is scheduled for January 2009.

Q: What are your future development plans?

A: We are currently looking into the development of certain APIs to allow for better integration with other systems, e.g. instant messaging and email. Further, we are developing micro clients for mobile and desktop use right now. The next big thing with 6-12 months ahead will be dashboard applications that provide us knowledge workers with a mash-up of better personalized information feeds than today’s tools.