These Things Matter to Me: Let's bring social bookmarking into the enterprise, with Magnolia (and *without* IBM)

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Let's bring social bookmarking into the enterprise, with Magnolia (and *without* IBM)

Last week Magnolia announced plans to open source their social bookmarking software. I haven't been a big Magnolia user (I use the similiarly-purposed delicious), but not for lack of interest or quality. In fact, two of their biggest cheerleaders, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina have always tempted me to port my delicious data in there, by their association alone, but I never got around to it.

But with the recent announcement that Magnolia will go open source, I'm interested not just as a consumer, but as an administrator/ service developer.

I don't really feel like I've had the ability to bring social bookmarking inside the enterprise as a service. For many organizations to feel comfortable going into "the cloud," the service needs to have hooks into SAML -> Active Directory/LDAP, a la Salesforce.com/Google Apps.
OR
I need to have the ability to run things locally on my own server. Until now, neither delicious nor Magnolia had this ability, and now Magnolia will have the ability to do the latter. Let's hope they have a plugin architecture, so somebody can LDAP it.

I'm currently using Drupal and Deki-Wiki in my web/collaboration stack. I could easily see adding Magnolia into that mix. Ideally they could all share user and session information.

The first code for Magnolia (codenamed "M2") is scheduled to drop in September 2008. I'll be watching.