Towards an Enterprise Social Network to Support Inter-organizational Collaborations

Since the 2000s, social networks have grown spectacularly until they are now regarded as indispensable and introduced as a daily practice of millions of users. Enterprises have become aware of the need and the importance of these collaborative tools, and the concept of Enterprise Social Network (ESN) has now emerged. As such, OpenPaaS is an innovative ESN that aims at facilitating inter-organizational collaborations. In this sense, this paper describes the new OpenPaaS platform to address current issues of ESNs: (i) the management and exchange of large amount of data during inter-organizational collaborations; (ii) the ability of the system to provide synchronous communications between collaborative partners; and finally, (iii) the establishment of transverse collaborations. This last point is a key feature of OpenPaaS, which goal is to automatically generate new inter-organizational coalitions by deducing collaborative processes in response to an opportunity of collaborations brought by any enterprise of the ESN.