Microsoft last week announced a connector between Microsoft Outlook, and profile information in Facebook. The service works by matching a user’s e-mail address to their Facebook profile. So if one of your contacts in Outlook is on Facebook, you will see whatever information is publicly available from their profile within Outlook (or whatever information you can access if you are “friends”). Microsoft previously announced a similar integration between Outlook at LinkedIn.

Microsoft’s move creates new challenges for organizations trying to balance the need to embrace the world of social software with concerns over security, compliance, privacy and productivity. Our 2010 benchmark of over 200 companies shows that 40% block access to public social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but often are forced to back off blanket bans due to employee demand or business justifications to participate in public social communities. Meanwhile, only 23% have a formal social strategy.

Allowing employees to engage with public social networks can provide real benefits in terms of building personal relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers, but of course carries risk and must be implemented with respect to information protection requirements (See Socialware’s recently released Guide to Facebook Social Networking Compliance).

We continue to spend a lot of time working with our clients to try and help them balance the need for openness with the reality of governance. Enterprise managers should take efforts by Microsoft and others to poke holes in the social firewall as further justification for a proactive enterprise social strategy.

Thank you to all who submitted proposals and have participated in the Call for Papers process. And now the Community Vote! Tell us which submissions are your favorites. Tell us which submissions address the E2 topics, issues and questions your enterprise is facing. Tell us which submissions you want us to consider for inclusion in the E2 Santa Clara Conference agenda.

We encourage all who submitted, all who plan on attending Enterprise 2.0 Conference Santa Clara, and anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0, to review the submissions, and vote for their favorites. Submissions are searchable by category, speaker or keyword, and votes received by each session will be viewable by all participants. Sessions advance to the “Crowd Favorites” stage based on community votes, after which they will be reviewed by the E2 Advisory Board. Submissions selected by the Advisory Board will then proceed to the final “Selected Sessions” stage. Selected speakers will be contacted in August.

We look forward to discovering the topics and sessions you want to see incorporated in the E2 Santa Clara 2010 Conference Agenda. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at mfarrell@techweb.com or (415) 947-6250.

After just coming back from E2.0 in Boston it’s safe to say that most vendors in the space (or so it seems) are moving in the same direction, towards enterprise collaboration, and when I say “enterprise collaboration” I literally mean collaboration for the enterprises, as in large companies.  Which leaves me asking, “what about small and medium size businesses?”  The small and medium size businesses in the E2.0 space are being under served in my opinion.  It also makes one wonder if a small or medium size business has the same needs as an enterprise business to begin with.  I say no.

From speaking with various companies of different shapes and sizes (and from owning a small business, Chess Media Group) I can say that while Enterprise size organizations are interested in collaboration many small businesses (and some mid size as well) are not.  Again, this is an observation but it seems as though smaller businesses are more interested in business management tools as opposed to collaboration tools.  The business I run works with a handful of people and the issue that we run into is that we are using multiple tools to do things such as share documents, invoice clients, email market,  project manage, time track, and keep track of contacts.  We don’t have trouble collaborating on things that needs to get done but we do run into challenges when it comes time to using multiple tools to run our business.

It wouldn’t make sense for many smaller organizations to use Sharepoint, Jive, Cisco’s Quad, or a host of other “collaboration” tools on the market today, but what about an overall business management tool (there are several possible candidates that I am aware of)?  Something that allows me to access Gdocs, Mailchimp, Freshbooks, integrate my contacts, and do anything else I need to manage my small business from one platform/interface?

Larger organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees have specific departments that handle these tasks and their challenges are based around finding the right people and information to get their jobs done in the best way possible.

So let me ask you, are business management tools more suited for small and medium size businesses whilst collaboration tools are more relevant for larger companies?  What have you seen?

Jacob is the Principal of Chess Media Group, a Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 consultancy.  Jacob also blogs on Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0, you can find him on Twitter @JacobM.