Tibco Tibbr first look

Tibco’s enterprise social networking system Tibbr, which launched on 24 January, is marketed by the infrastructure software provider as the first social computing tool that allows employees, customers and partners to interact with each other, as well as with information and events generated by enterprise IT systems.

We saw the system running on both tablets and mobile devices when it was demonstrated at the UK launch.

The major difference between Tibbr and other social networking applications, such as Facebook, is the provision of event streams, Tibco says.

Event streams are topics to which users can subscribe. Users then receive messages updated in real-time, hourly or daily, about that topic.

For example, an event stream could be created for specific members of the IT department to pass information about say, an SAP rollout, or marketing department employees could set up an event stream for their firm's latest product launch.

Hardware requirements
Tibco says that users wishing to deploy the system on-premise will need two quad-core servers with 8GB of system memory, costing between $2,000 and $3,000.

The system does not require an upgrade to gigabit Ethernet, according to Tibco, but in this initial release, there is no support for integration with Skype or other enterprise communications systems like Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) or Avaya and Cisco offerings.

Browser and device support
Tibco says that all major browsers are supported, from Internet Explorer version 6 upwards, to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Native clients exist for Apple's iPad and iPhone devices, and Android devices are supported. Windows 7 and Windows Mobile devices are not yet supported - these will be supported in a later release.

On-premise or off-premise
Pricing for both on-premise and off-premise (cloud-based) systems run in Tibco datacentres is the same – $12 per user per month, with volume discounts available for larger enterprises.

Features and functionality
One of the major reasons Tibbr is classified as an enterprise system is its integration with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) through the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

Tibbr users or groups of Tibbr users can easily be created by importing AD information straight into the user creation screen.

Users logging into the system for the first time drop onto their home page and are met with Tibbr's main 'wall', which has six tabbed options across the top of the browser window – these are Home, Subjects, People, My Profile, Event Streams and Administrator.

The user's profile appears on the left-hand side, subjects and event streams on the right-hand side, with the main messages presented centrally and occupying most of the screen estate [see picture].

Clicking on the Subjects tab brings up a screen showing what subjects in the enterprise a user is following, a directory of the subjects created by other users, and the ability to create a subject.

An example of Subjects could be different company departments, such as Engineering, Finance or HR. Issues affecting such departments would be posted on that subject's wall for use by people following that particular subject [see picture].

The People tab gives users access to a Facebook-type page showing which people they are currently following, but also access to a company directory with all employees' details.

The My Profile tab allows users to view and edit their profile. Data from fields formed from AD contents cannot be edited and users will need administrator permission to create new fields in their profile, which would be best set up when the user is created.

Another significant feature of Tibbr is the Event Streams tab. When clicked, users see two more options – Work Streams and Life Streams. In Work Streams users can configure message scheduling and settings on applications such as SAP CRM, Salesforce.com, or SharePoint to automatically message them on Tibbr [see picture].

With Life Streams, the concept is the same but messages and feeds from consumer applications such Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can be automatically re-directed onto user's Tibbr accounts.

The upshot of these features is that although Tibco says Tibbr is not replacing email but working alongside it, it does offer a "single pane of glass" for users to see work and non-work related messages