The Web and Social Computing layer represents a standardized and optimized foundation that lets you build, customize, and manage enterprise-class Web applications. In addition, this pattern helps you provide rich Web capabilities and compelling and differentiated user experiences, including rich media, targeted personalization, geospatial visualization, and search. Additional capabilities that Web and Social Computing enables include co-authoring and self-publishing on external sites with blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds. This layer also includes people-centric social computing capabilities such as skills catalogs and social networking.

In the context of the Platform Vision model, this layer represents the ability to personalize features for information retrieval, e-commerce, search, and communication. It also enables analysis and measurement of the results of Web activities. In the context of the Platform Vision Model’s infrastructure, this layer can provide simple authentication and authorization of user access and other security-related functionality for online applications in the absence of an enterprise authentication system.

A common example of web and social computing is a customer support site that faces the internet. This site can not only provide product support, downloads, and troubleshooting; very often these sites have customer forums which provide their own social network and self support.

Architectural pre-requisites: Infrastructure, Security, SOA and BPM, Data, IT Process, User Experience, ECM and Collaboration, Business Intelligence

Architectural recommendations: Integrated Communications

Solution patterns it enables: User Experience