CMS Watch says LinkedIn gaining in enterprise

As today's post on the IBM partnership with LinkedIn attests, LinkedIn is gaining traction in the enterprise, and a new CMS Watch report says that in spite of the hype that Facebook has received for its enterprise integration, LinkedIn is moving faster to develop tools for enterprise use.

"Both platforms are increasingly important to professionals worldwide, but LinkedIn is beginning to make more progress towards services that can support enterprise-oriented social computing," explained CMS Watch analyst Jarrod Gingras.

The report evaluated 26 social software and collaboration tools and found that LinkedIn's measured approach to integrating applications appealed to enterprise users. "There's good reason for all that growth," notes CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne, "and Facebook certainly has a better 'fun factor,' but I’m not as sanguine about the platform's business potential as I was a year ago, whereas LinkedIn seems to be pursuing a measured plan to provide more value to the enterprise."

Since LinkedIn has added groups capability and add-on applications, it has increased its social utility and this could have a lot of application in the enterprise. Before it was more of a glorified address book and online resume. Now it's much more. Facebook gives enterprise developers a much more flexible platform on which to build, but it may be that enterprises looking for ways to integrate Web 2.0 applications find the existing application set in LinkedIn, a more manageable way to get started.

For more information, see:
- the CMS Watch press release [1]