Yesterday was the last day of my studies. I presented my diploma thesis to the examination board and passed this final exam. Due to many requests I am going to publish my thesis here. The bad thing is for all of you outside Germany: it is written in German. The good thing is: there are many many screenshots i.e. of Twitter with English content and even my own graphics have a high degree of English words. So maybe you will be able to get the message The title “Social Software im Projektmanagement: Einsatzpotenziale und fachliche Konzeption eines Enterprise Microblogs für die wissensbasierte Projektkommunikation” can be translated with “Social Software for Project Management: Potential Uses and Conceptual Design of an Enterprise Microblog for knowledge-based Project Communication”. The essence of this is: A Concept of an Enterprise Microblog. This concept was the basis for the Enterprise Microblogging tool Communote which launched its public beta two weeks ago.

The structure of the thesis is as follows: After introductory text chapter 2 starts with basics from project management, knowledge management and so on. Chapter 3 introduces basic concepts of social software. It starts to get interesting in chapter 4 “Microblogging” where I explain the issue and give an overview about existing tools. 4.4 is a great case study about a company using microblogging since 1998. Yes, 1998! This story is worth writing an own paper about it and this is exactly what I will do after Christmas. So just wait a bit and you will have it in English.

Chapter 5 deals with possible usage scenarios. For this I have a look at Twitter and give some examples for plain communication, coordination and cooperation and discuss possible uses in an enterprise context. Chapter 6 shows the conceptualisation of Communote and 7 evaluates this process. Chapter 8 shows my visions for the future development of the microblogging technology before I finally give a sum up and lessons learned.

I am going to pick out some highlights of the thesis during the next weeks and publish it here at my blog in English.

I want to say a great Thank You to the brilliant team of Communardo, the company behind Communote, and espacially to its CEO and Communote project manager Dirk Röhrborn. During my thesis there were many people out there in the web who helped me with input. I want to thank all these guys from Twitter and the Blogosphere.

Finally you can find the document here: Thesis Enterprise Microblogging (Communote) (9 MB)

From time to time I am involved in discussions about the best reference management programme. Personally I use BibSonomy and I am  very happy with it. BibSonomy is a Web 2.0-like online tool with a powerful tagging functionality and an open API (see BibSonomy content at the sidebar here or the tag cloud on the my research page).

However, good friends of mine use other tools like Citavi. They say that Citavi has nice features for knowledge organisation. For example you can create the structure of a research paper in Citavi and add references to the sections. Finally it takes seconds to export the reference list for this paper.

As I know BibSonomy has only rudimental support for such use cases. You can “pick” references from your existing lists and collect them in a basket. The basket’s entries can be exported for a reference list. Unfortunately there is no support for paper creation.

One possible way would be to use BibSonomy for collaborative reference sharing/tagging and export/import all the references to Citavi once I want to create a paper. Ok, this is not the most elegant way but it would work. But imagine you would have a Citavi-like functionality for BibSonomy. You would not only be able to share your references but even your paper structures and drafts. This mashup would be able to suggest a further reference D for a paper’s section just because there is another author who used A, B, C and D in the same paragraph while you only use A, B and C.

Another lack of function of BibSonomy is the missing support of knowledge extraction from the sources. When saving a HTML page or a PDF document I probably have one or two sentences I am interested in. Maybe there are even different parts of the document and I want to give them different tags. It would be great to mark interesting parts of a reference and write comments/give tags.

Both extensions - support of paper creation and extended knowledge management - would perfectly fit together. Ingredients for the mashup would be the BibSonomy API, a powerful JavaScript-library (paper creation would be good with drag and drop) and maybe an online editor like Google Docs to finally write the paper. It would take much time to build a ready application. I do not have this time. But maybe I try to build a little prototype of the paper-creation-functionality and than we will see. Maybe someone wants to participate?

I was strongly involved in the development of the enterprise microblogging service communote. Therefore it is very exciting to see the launch of the public beta today. The German launch was successful earlier this day (see the recorded session here). Today at 5pm GMT | 12am EST | 9am PST will be the English launch. You can follow it on mogulus.

Communote has some great features. I would love to see the powerful tagging and filtering functionality in other social software tools. For example you can combine filtering by author, tags, full text search and time period. You can drill down through the tags. In every view you will see an updated version of the tag cloud and the remaining filter options. Every combination can be saved (it is like a strongly extended following-functionality from Twitter) and has its own RSS feed.

You can see a demo of the core features here: