Enterprise Flow

My guiding principles for the future state of enterprise applications are:

- hybrid cloud + premise

- end user driven

- social

- device agnostic

- flow based

- sense aware

An interesting example of some of these principles applied to the enterprise is Zenbe's "Shareflow" which allows enterprise users to build flows of communication streams around relevant people and topics.  Here's a summary from Matt Marshall at VentureBeat.

"For too long now, email has remained oddly stupid: We can expand an email, forward it, or reply. But for groups of people working together on projects, it’s awful — not to mention overwhelming. Google has implemented something called email “threads” into its Gmail service, which lets us see the back and forths of conversations. But that’s about it.

However, a rash of recent innovation is starting to challenge email as the predominant form of work-flow communication.

Zenbe, a New York City-based startup, is the latest example. The company today has released something called Shareflow. Shareflow is essentially a web-based dashboard that lets you see the flow of communication around a given topic (see image below). In many ways, Shareflow is like Google’s Wave product, released in late May. 

In each case, the page becomes a stream of things posted about the topic, with the most recent item posted at the top, and the previous posts moving down the page. However, Shareflow takes a step further than email by letting you incorporate your regular email into the flow."