Right around the time we presented the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment at Demo Jam, a handful of micro-communications products marketed to enterprise communities announced their releases.  In the surrouding weeks, Yammer (”Twitter with a business model“) won the TechCrunch50 demo competition and Present.ly (”micro-update communications for your company“) launched at Web 2.0 Expo NY. ESME has been duking it out with these larger competitors in the current flurry of excitement in this space.  In the process, the project has received terrific interest from industry watchers and has actively engaged the SAP Community with coverage in more than 35 articles and blog posts in the last couple weeks. I am aggregating some highlights here.

ESME: Is This What an Enterprise Twitter Could Look Like? - by Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb)

ESME aims to bring all the best things about Twitter to global business communication. Rapid collaboration, network effects leveraged for support, multiple interfaces and some advanced features that Twitter itself doesn’t yet offer.

We think there’s a whole lot of potential here.

Why I liked SAP’s TechEd Community Day - by Michael Krigsman (ZDNet)

One the most interesting initiatives to emerge from the SAP online community is a an enterprise-capable, open source instant messaging project called Enterprise Social Messaging Environment (ESME).

Organizations that foster supportive networks of cooperative activity are more likely to achieve successful IT execution than those that don’t. 

SAP’s Community Day, with ESME as its symbolic poster child, reminds us of that important lesson.

‘ESME’: Social messaging within an enterprise SOA environment -  Oliver Marks (ZDNet)

…the community around ESME should be congratulated for pushing the envelope. This is a valuable differentiator for the enterprise focused, which is helpful in cutting out some of the Twitter inanity and focusing on powerful business case uses of social networking.

Enterprise Twittering – Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment for SAP Demo Jam - by Michael Coté (Redmonk)

…a well done example of how something Twitter-like could be used in a company to do “real work.”

Demo Jam Liv; SAP meets enterprise 2.0; The ROI of spell check - by Larry Dignan (ZDNet)

Now we have something called ESME. It’s a mix of Twitter and SAP and other messaging. This looks interesting… Tracking people. Messaging. Corporate data. Woo hoo. 

The Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment - Chris Dalby Untangles Networks

Quite honestly, it looks amazing.  A twitter style messaging application for the enterprise with common sense functionality like groups and tag clouds.

TechCrunch50 – ESME? - by Benjamin Ellis (Business Tech Feed)

Unlike earlier ideas of business twitter, ESME seems a very complete offering. There are instructions on how to use the code for yourself, and a desktop client too. 

List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet - Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester)

The Gravitational Pull Of Enterprise 2.0 - Sandy Kemsley (/message)

A few highlights from the SAP Community:

ESME – the Enterprise Social Media Experiment - by Nigel James

So it’s all about getting what you want without having to know where to get it from. It’s about breaking open information silos and sharing information with colleagues to create solutions quicker and get the job done.

Geeks-are-more-predictable-than-others - Ram Manohar Tiwari

I will keep an eye on ESME but unlike earlier attempts of SAP community to replicate Blog/Wiki applications, this one seems have a better case for replication.

Tech Ed RIA Hacker Night - Andre Salazar (Adobe)

I’m also pretty excited for the Demo Jam, mainly to get a look at what the ESME guys are doing

Community serendipity delivers value - Craig Cmehil (SAP)

It’s amazing the power that can be generated, harassed and directed in virtual environments and this project has shown that anything is possible!

ESME Team Member Meetups – Accidentally on Purpose

The ESME conversationalists list (those engaged in the collaborative conversation about ESME) looks like a “whose who” of some top SAP Community Network members.

Curious About ESME? - Mark Finnern (SAP)

Announcing the ESME workshop at SAP TechEd

Meet some of the developers/people engaged with the ESME (Harpoon) Twitter for the Enterprise project. Things that we will cover:

  • How it come to be
  • How people got engaged
  • The API for accessing ESME from desktop and server-based applications
  • An over-view of ESME’s plumbing including the use of Scala’s Actor’s and lift’s AJAX and Comet support
  • Using Scala and lift to write external services that hook up to ESME