It’s quite difficult, as many of you probably know first hand, to keep track of all the various platforms, vendors, and open source projects in the social computing and enterprise collaboration space. Like content management systems, social software platforms seem to just keep multiplying rather than consolidating.

Thankfully, the folks at CMS Watch, who’ve historically done an unparalleled job tracking the content management system market – including commercial and open source options – have put out a revised 2009 edition of their Enterprise Social Software and Collaboration Report. (Full disclosure: I count a number of CMS Watch employees as friends and former colleagues – and they provided me with a review license to the full report).

The ESSCR is very ambitious, including in its 500+ pages coverage of public networks, enterprise platform vendors and social software suites as well as blog, wiki, and community vendors. In this figure from the report you can get a sense for the breadth and depth of the field:

In addition to taking a broad functional view of “social software” they also include a variety of business models, including purchase-and-install software,  hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS), and Open Source projects in three categories (Blogs, Wikis, and Social Software Suites).

The core strength of the report is an in-depth analysis of products from over 20 vendors. Each evaluation covers not only the functional capabilities of the product being discussed (what services it provides well and poorly) from an end user perspective but also what it is like for administrators, developers, and managers to work with. Finally, there’s a “vendor intangibles” section which helps you understand the viability, direction, and strength of the organization behind the project as well as what it is like to get support and other associated services.

It’s by far the most exhaustive and comprehensive attempt to understand and evaluate the landscape of social software with an eye toward helping enterprises make smart decisions I’ve ever seen. There are three strong initial chapters on understanding social software, building a business case, and identifying common usage scenarios, but the focus here (as opposed to, for example, a book like Groundswell) is clearly on evaluating and comparing the various platforms: this is a report for people looking to make decisions and get moving. (The section of “Social Software Product Comparisons” which contains the detailed evaluation of the platforms runs from pg. 90 to pg. 495 -roughly 80% of the report’s pages).

Because the report is trying to cover so much ground – from broad networks like LinkedIn to specific platforms like WordPress, the coverage in individual areas can come across as more abbreviated than one would like.

The section on blogging, for example, correctly identifies WordPress (open source or SaaS hosted), Movable Type (including installed software, open source,  and SaaS hosted), and Blogger (only available as SaaS) as key platforms to consider, and evaluate each in some detail. But this ignores a number of other options:

• The open source Java-based Roller, which powers multi-user blogs at Sun, IBM Developer Works, and blog.usa.gov.
• The SaaS options from SquareSpace (better known among designers, artists, and freelance developers than enterprises, but a viable option for SaaS)
• Licensed software from Expression Engine (not to be confused with Microsoft® Expression®).

One could argue, of course, that between them Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type (especially if you include hosted, open source, and commercial licensed options) have really dominated the world of blogging in the enterprise. Yet the “not reviewed but worth noting” section of the blogs chapter instead points to Textpattern, b2evolution, Pivot, and Serendipity, all relatively simple open source CMS frameworks with (I’d argue) less enterprise following than Roller. One could also, of course, build a blog system in essentially any CMS – I’ve even heard of brave souls using Sharepoint as a blog engine.

This same issues is evident in the section on public networks, which looks at LinkedIn, XING, and Facebook but doesn’t delve into current-enterprise-darling Twitter (or any of it’s “inside the firewall” clones like Yammer), and doesn’t look at the networks popular in areas where Facebook is less dominant.It may be that at this point the very definition of “Enterprise Social Software and Collaboration” starts to break down – when enterprise employees collaborate (or at least communicate) with each other over Facebook and Twitter, is it worthwhile to consider their use of these tools as distinct from the way consumers use these tools? That’s a major open question – but the report doesn’t go deep into the potential implications of that discussion, simply noting that the tools have not been designed for traditional enterprise needs, and are unlikely to satisfy traditional enterprise requirements.

Also missing from any sustained analysis are:

• Alfresco, and especially the SharePoint competitor Alfresco Share. (See screencasts at Optaros Labs: part one, part two)
• Other major open source CMS platforms like Plone and Django which could also be used to meet similar use cases (beyond mentions in the “compare to” category),
• Open source social platforms like Joomla!, Pligg, and Elgg
• The OpenSocial standard and related platforms:  Shindig, SocialSite, and Partuza.

While this list undoubtedly reflects my own interests (and, in the interest of full disclosure, Optaros’ partnership with Alfresco), it also shows the difficulty of really getting into enterprise social software across open source, SaaS, and licensed options.

On the one hand, it is great to see CMS Watch not separating out the options on the basis of source code access. Increasingly, enterprises can acquire and use open source platforms in ways similar to those through which they’ve always acquired and used proprietary solutions. Analyst firms who create separate staff and separate reports to cover “Open Source” applications – separate from those covering the same types of applications in the traditional software world never do proper justice to the potential of the open source options. (See, for example, the Forrester Wave on community platforms, which evaluated nine commercial options but doesn’t even mention open source options, despite Forrester’s earlier report on Web CMS platforms and Open Source which named Drupal and Alfresco as platforms to watch).

Ultimately, however, mixing the open source solutions with the proprietary and SAAS solutions in this case obscures the key differences between them. In trying to provide broad coverage across functional areas, deployment and pricing models, and usage scenarios there isn’t enough time to also discuss IT strategy: when you might build on open source software versus when you might rely on SAAS offerings, or what the pros and cons of the various approaches can be.

One example that caught my eye is when the report faults Drupal for not offering microblogging:

The story here is very simple: Drupal doesn’t provide Micro-blogging – yet. The community sanctioned and began an Micro-blogging module project in August 2008, but there is no timeline for its release. If Micro-blogging is really important to you, it’s best that you look elsewhere.

In the world of open source, rather than looking elsewhere, one could also just build it! Using the existing CCK and Views modules, or even writing a custom module from scratch, microblogging is a trivial implementation on Drupal for even a moderately experienced developer. There’s no need to wait for community sanction or vendor approval – though collaborating with the community might help eliminate duplication. (In fact, this note caught my eye as we’ve built just such a microblogging module for our own Drupal-based intranet and expect to release it shortly).

More to the point, there are fundamental core differences in how enterprises engage with software platforms: it matters greatly what software is open source, what is traditionally licensed and installed, and what is available as SaaS. It’s not the only determiner of success or failure, but you can bet it has a significant impact on cost, on flexibilty, and on adoption.

Ultimately, of course, no report is really going to identify what the right product(s) or project(s) are for your business need AND what your IT strategy for software procurement should be. What a report can do – and this one does so admirably well given the breadth and newness of the field – is identify the strengths, weaknesses, and peculiarities of the available options laid out in a way that is easy to understand and digest. It isn’t that you should buy and read this report rather than participating in the social software community, and working out an IT strategy that will provide you with cost-effective business flexibility, but that buying this report will prepare you to be asking the right questions and trying the right things.

The report is available now from CMS Watch and comes in either Standard Edition or Blog and Wiki Edition (which omits the evaluations of the tools in the other four categories, but includes all the other introductory sections), priced for either “team use” (up to 12 people) or “site license” (for the corporate intranet).