When it comes to integrating systems of record with systems of engagement, the enterprise social networking industry has only scratched the surface of what’s possible. With its deep integration roots, we felt TIBCO was in the best position to take a leadership role.
So that’s what we did with the launch of tibbr 3.0.
In this powerful upgrade, we further delivered upon our vision to connect people not only with relevant colleagues, but the data and business systems that drive their business as well.
We’ve heard many talk about “integration,” but we don’t view a REST API, partnerships between social start-ups and application vendors, or iFrames embedded in another application as true integration. The publishing of static events into an activity stream – and then requiring people to leave their social computing app to take action on those events – isn’t adequate for enterprises looking to derive value from social computing.
It’s also not enough to merely pull events from an individual department app – say, a sales CRM app – since the whole company isn’t comprised of sales people. Such limited integration wouldn’t enable true cross functional collaboration.
So with tibbr 3.0, we built robust integrations to key enterprise systems utilized across a whole company, including Oracle expenses, Salesforce.com CRM, SAP Orders and Microsoft SharePoint. The key with all of these integrations: They’re bi-directional. Employees can close the loop on key business processes in their systems and applications without leaving the context-rich confines of their tibbr activity stream.
For example, many companies use Oracle to handle their expenses. So when it’s the end of the month, you itemize and categorize your expenses in Oracle Expenses. This is an action that gets surfaced in tibbr. There, your boss receives an update inside his activity stream. Now, with a simple click of a button, your boss can approve the expense report in Oracle without leaving his or her tibbr activity stream.
This is just another example of how tibbr helps people close the loop on key business processes and get real work done with social computing. We’re planning to build more integrations of this kind in upcoming releases, and look forward to getting more feedback from our customers on what other business processes we can make social.
