EnThinnai in the Enterprise
Nov 14th, 2007 by Aswath
Yesterday Oracle launched an internal social networking application (Hat tip: Anne Zelenka) called Oracle Mix: “Mix is our combination social network, idea sharing site, group collaboration tool, and answers forum.” Interestingly, when the initial planning stages, the team was bombarded with many questions. One of the interesting one was: “Would I be able to invite customers into this network?” Any application targeted for the enterprise market needs to address the conflicting requirements – the need for safeguarding proprietary information and the ability to share information with customers and temporal business partners. One of our targeted market segment is the enterprise market, we need to address this question as well. On the one hand users must be able to add people outside of the enterprise and share information with them; at the same time, their access must be restricted in a discrete way. We meet this objective in two ways. We use OpenID for authentication. Since OpenID is user-centric, enterprises need not be concerned with managing authentication mechanism; also a person who may partner with multiple enterprises can use a single id to belong to all their networks. Secondly, EnThinnai subscribes to the philosophy of “default deny”. Because of this, a user will be able to control the access to every data. This gives the user the ability to share some with their external partners while denying access to others.