How To Give Your Walls Ears
Date : 2008 01 02 Category : Tech & Development ProgrammableWebOne beautiful feature of Basecamp from 37 Signals is the group chat facility. When Basecamp subscribers use their enterprise chat application to communicate, it automatically logs and remembers the conversation. This is neat little feature for consumers, and I’ve used it in my own personal toolset, but this is a fantastic feature for an Enterprise. How many many valuable questions are asked between engineers during development, or from support personnel to subscribers, or between sales engineers and the field technicians? The ability to capture these conversations, and make them searchable for others in the future, really increases the productivity of employees at virtually no cost to them or the enterprise. If you’re a Basecamp customer, you’re in luck - but what if you aren’t? Is there any hope for you to add this feature to your Enterprise application suite? If you can write a mashup, the answer is a resounding yes.
A key benefit of mashup architectures is their light-weight nature. Mashups allow the web designer to quickly and easily sew in services to existing web sites and Enterprise applications with a minimum of integration time and expense. Most IM vendors have APIs available for their services, including AOL, Google, Yahoo! and my favorite uber-chat-site - Meebo. Writing applications on top of the API is simple, and most support some sort of archiving or listening feature.
Here’s how I’d extend my enterprise knowledge base to remember all those important chat applications:
I’d write a Rails application to accept employees IM credentials, and have options for time of day logging, etc. I’d write a small Ruby application that uses the appropriate IM API to listen in on the conversation, and save all the transactions to a database. I’d rely on Rails one more time to produce reports for the application. I’d like to be able to search the database for a term, then click on the result to see the conversations around it. I’d also like to be able to see the most searched terms, recent results, etc. Finally, to glue it into the infrastructure, a nice snippet of HTML would be great so that my IT/IS department can include it on the company Intranet.The downsides? There are a few: Employees would probably need to have a separate account for work and a separate account for personal chats. In many organizations, this is already the norm. Employees would also need to be a bit careful about the topics they use IM for; salary negotiations are probably not the right topic. Employers would be wise to implement this sort of functionality where organizational memory was most important, such as tech support, development and sales engineering.