Setting up a Facebook group is a snap, but using Facebook groups as your company intranet has a few more wrinkles, including how to handle private business information.
Setting up a private group on Facebook, as Serena Software has done, isn't complicated. But turning it into a functioning intranet requires a little more planning and preparation. The most obvious concern about Facebook groups is the apparent lack of privacy -- generally, you can both search for them and view them before deciding whether to join. But with an intranet, you don't want anyone other than your employees to open a window into what's happening inside the company. Fortunately, Facebook provides a solution to this dilemma: The administrator can set group membership to "invitation only."
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This setting enables the administrator to limit access to the group, allowing only validated employees. Employees can be validated in various ways, but perhaps none is better than asking them connect to a group administrator on Facebook in a certain time period using a secret keyword embedded in an invitation to connect.
But Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst for social computing at Forrester Research, urges companies not to try this, at least as groups are currently configured on Facebook. "You don't have full control over the security [on Facebook]; there are too many risks," cautions Owyang. However, Facebook is reportedly developing an enterprise version of groups to deal with such concerns.
At this point, groups aren't good for storing documents such as PDFs. This is one of several reasons Serena Software chose to store its confidential intranet documents on another site it perceived as more secure: HiveLive. Serena employees may find a blurb about a document of interest to them on Facebook, but then they must click a link through to HiveLive to obtain the document itself.
Note: Facebook declined to be interviewed for this story.
