Photon Infotech has announced enhancements to its Social Media Framework: Enterprise Edition. For the first time, Fortune 500 and SME organizations alike can rapidly integrate Facebook-like connectivity and collaboration into their existing IT infrastructure without compromising data security.

"Most current investments in enterprise portal and intranet projects have resulted only in new document archives, not active collaboration," said Srinivas Balasubramanian, CEO of Photon. "Meanwhile, employees actively use Facebook and build ad hoc Linked In groups that don't conform to corporate security and privacy policies. The Social Media Framework: Enterprise Edition simplifies bringing social media technologies behind the firewall to create a secure collaborative environment based on best practices."

The Photon Social Media Framework: Enterprise Edition, built atop Photon's enhanced service-oriented architecture (SOA) software layer, incorporates best practices developed during more than 150 social media and mobile projects successfully executed for startups and Global 2000 companies. Because the framework integrates with a company's existing infrastructure, it ensures the fastest possible time to value and minimizes the need to purchase and deploy additional solutions. The Photon Social Media Framework: Enterprise Edition includes three core pieces:

Photon Social Media SOA Layer: The SOA layer of the Photon Social Media Framework: Enterprise Edition is easier to deploy and maintain, ensuring rapid time-to-value and low total cost of ownership (TCO). In order to leverage the investment in a client's existing enterprise systems and eliminate the need to migrate data, the Photon Social Media Framework: Enterprise Edition includes pre-built SOA connectors to many of the most widely used enterprise collaboration tools, such as Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007, with plans to support Liferay and other portal frameworks later this year. The framework leverages popular development tools such as Adobe® Flex® and Microsoft Silverlight(TM) to provide the social media look and feel. The SOA layer also includes APIs, so new functionality such as enterprise microblogging can easily be added.

Social Media ROI: Photon has also leveraged its broad Social Media experience to create the Social Media ROI Guide: Enterprise Edition. This metric-based set of qualitative and quantitative guidelines will enable clients to achieve insight into the impact of corporate initiatives such as "Facebook Behind the Firewall" on the business. By incorporating usage statistics right into the social media platform itself, and also providing an on-going survey-based research framework, clients can track both business value and employee attitudes over short and long-term periods.