In-house social networking tools your company can use to empower your staff

At first blush, you might think the idea of deploying an in-house social network is a bad one. After all, the last thing you want is for your employees to be spending time not being productive. However, it’s been proven, time and again, that happy employees are far more productive than those who are dissatisfied.

So giving those workers a social outlet would go a long way to help foster an environment people want to work in.

However, opening the floodgates to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram could be a recipe for disaster. After all, you have zero control over what goes on with those networks (outside of blocking their usage). Instead, why not create a social network platform specifically for your company, one that is only available to employees so they can communicate with one another on issues other than work? They can even use it to collaborate!

Most importantly, you create an environment of freedom and trust. That trust will go a long, long way to bringing a level of productivity from your staff you’ve not seen before.

But what tools are available? It’s not like you can install Facebook on your data center (or cloud-hosted provider). You could always outsource Java development to create a social networking platform-specific to and for your business. Or you could deploy one of these options, each of which can be installed on off-the-shelf hardware.

Let’s dive in and see what each platform has to offer.

Rocket.chat

Rocket.chat isn’t quite as full-featured as what you might find in the rest of the list. This open-source communication platform is more geared toward team collaboration for DevOps and customer engagement. Even so, Rocket.chat can be deployed for in-house communication and collaboration such that employees can feel free to use it for more than just collaboration on projects. Think of Rocket.chat as the Slack you can install in-house. And by deploying the platform in-house, you have absolute control over every aspect of it.

Rocket.chat also allows you to install addons from the Marketplace, including bots, content management, design, health & wellness, office management, productivity, media & news, team culture, and voice & video. With the right additions, you can turn this basic communications tool into something a bit extra.

Elgg

If you’re looking for a more full-featured social network to deploy to your company, Elgg might be exactly what you need. This particular tool can be used for just about any type of organization. The one thing to know about Elgg is that it’s just an engine on which you can build just about any platform you need. Because of it being an engine, you’ll need to have a talented crew of developers (either in-house or from an outsourced development company) to turn it into a viable platform your employees can use.

That being said, Elgg does offer a showcase (to see what other companies have done with the tool) and features a Hello, World! application, a beginning developers group, plenty of documentation to get you started, an API reference guide, all of the source code you need, and a bug tracker.

If your company has the developers to make Elgg work, there’s no limit to what you can create with this platform.

HumHub

HumHub is an open-source social networking platform that offers all the usual features found in similar tools, but without ads and privacy invasion. The HumHub interface resembles that of Facebook, and the features are equally similar. You’ll find notifications, activity streams, files, directories, groups, user profiles, sharing, and searching. HumHub is mobile-ready, so it can be viewed on either desktop or mobile browsers.

HumHub comes in two different licenses:

• Community – Free and includes the usual crop of features.
• Enterprise – $120.00/month for up to 50 users or $409.00/month for up to 500 users and includes additional features like commercial support, categories, and expanded LDAP support.

Because HumHub is modular, you can enable or disable any features you like for your company.

Opensource Social Network

Opensource Social Network is probably one of the best options you’ll find. This platform has a Facebook-like interface and includes all of the standard features found in the popular service, such as messaging, friend request panels, groups, photos, files, messages, news feeds, and invitations.

Opensource Social Network also includes third-party integrations, tools, themes, games, audio and video calls, and authentication. One thing your company will appreciate with Opensource Social Network is that it has been highly optimized to use resources very well, which means installing the platform on off-the-shelf hardware won’t result in a social network too slow to keep up with growing demand.

If your admins aren’t up to the task of installing Opensource Social Network, the developers behind the software have a Virtual Machine Image available for download, so you can deploy the platform very quickly.

BuddyPress

If your company already makes use of WordPress, you can expand its features to include social networking functionality. With BuddyPress, you can add member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, notifications, friendships, private messaging, and third-party integration.

BuddyPress can be installed on any instance of WordPress, version 5.6 or higher. The addon is free and has more than 200,000 active installations. This is a great way to add social networking functionality to your company, without having to go through the motions of installing everything, from the ground up.

BuddyPress is free and available in 45 languages.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a way to boost the morale of your employees or give them the means to better communicate with one another, you should try and add an in-house, private social network service. You might find your staff to be happier and more productive.