The main difference between Cogenz and publicly accessible social bookmarking sites is that subscribing companies get their own “silo” that only its’ users can access. As beta tester Anu Gupta more eloquently puts it:

Instead of the del.icio.us model of a huge vat of shared tag soup (ignoring private bookmarks), cogenz pours the soup into different company bowls and only allows you to drink from your own bowl. OK, enough with the soup analogy - basically it allows companies to have a private version of del.icio.us and not worry about installing and maintaining scuttle or similar.”

With this model, it’s quite important to give someone in the organisation control over how their silo works. At the moment our beta testers can’t access this (because they are set up as users), so here’s a quick intro to the administration functions:

1. Registration

Administrators can allow registrations only from certain email domains, and can also set their silo up so that they must approve every new user who registers.

2. IP restriction

In addition to registration controls, administrators can also restrict access to their silo by public IP address/subnet range. If IP restriction is used, then anonymous browsing can also be enabled which means that everyone in your organisation can search and browse users, tags and bookmarks without having to log in.

3. Posting to del.icio.us

It’s likely that some organisations will have users who want to continue using public bookmarking services, so we have a del.icio.us integration option. When turned on, users can use the Cogenz browser buttons to post an item to both Cogenz and del.icio.us simultaneously.

4. User management

There are some pretty standard user management tools within Cogenz, allowing an administrator to activate/deactivate users, view their bookmarks, edit their profile, and delete them.

5. Account tags

One of the key features of Cogenz is the concept of account tags. Through account tags it is very easy to create informal user groups - for example, departments or practices, geographies or areas of expertise. Administrators can easily manage the account tags that users apply to themselves.

6. Tag management

All the tags applied to bookmarks by your users can get unwieldy pretty quickly, so the administrator has tools to edit, consolidate and remove tags site-wide.

7. Usage data

Given that many companies will want to use Cogenz to experiment with enterprise bookmarking, it is important to provide some usage data. At the moment, Cogenz displays this in a tabular format providing monthly, weekly and daily data. In future versions, we’ll be looking to add some much more useful visualisations to identify the connections between bookmarks, tags and users.

So there you have it - a whirlwind guide to the administration functions within Cogenz.