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David F. Carr, The Brainyard
David F. Carr, The Brainyard
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Inside Motley Fool's Enterprise Social Network

The Motley Fool established an enterprise social network to combat portal, wiki, and email overload -- and it's working.

Enterprise social networking turned out to be a foolish choice for the Motley Fool, which is to say it turned out to be a good thing.

Founded in 1993, the Motley Fool operates today as a financial news, analysis, and discussion website for investors, including premium services for subscribers. Based in Alexandria, Va., the Fool employs about 250 people, including a few in London and Australia.

The financial website publisher turned to Socialtext last spring, after an initial flirtation with Yammer. The intranet site Motley Fool created with Socialtext is branded Jingle, after the jingle bells on a jester's hat. "It was intended to fill voids that weren't being filled, and also to replace some tools we had that were based on old technology that is no longer supported," said Jeb Bishop, head of creative services for Motley Fool.

Before Jingle, the Fool's intranet website was organized around a homegrown content management system that ran on "classic" ASP, an older version of Microsoft's web scripting technology for Windows web servers. Bishop was the only one left who could make sense of the code, and the system was impossible to extend, having outlived its usefulness, he said. Information had become scattered across many systems, including a wiki and a SharePoint portal.

"That was a complete nightmare -- when you were looking for something, was it in the wiki, or was it in SharePoint?" Bishop said. "Now, we know, because it's all in one place."

Read the rest of this article on The Brainyard.

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