Online communities for business are much different from social-networking communities like MySpace or Facebook. Since people are supposed to be productive at work, spending time in online communities isn’t necessarily an activity that the boss is likely to see as a good thing.

According to Open Text Vice President Martin Sumner-Smith, the key to building a successful online business community is to work overtime to ensure that people can find what they need to help them in their jobs. While networking and making new contacts are certainly elements of business communities, more important is making it easy for members to find content and information they can take back to their companies and put to practical use.

To that end, Sumner-Smith and his team running the Open Text Online community made sure to use advanced communities of practice tools with comprehensive tracking capabilities. “We can tell what people are interested in, what they are finding and what they are not finding,” says Sumner-Smith. “As a result, we make sure we pick the right things. The key has been to focus on what people really need.”

Along the same lines, Sumner-Smith isn’t inclined to push technology for the sake of technology. Within the enterprise software community in general, most people tend toward the conservative side when it comes to new technology. Sumner-Smith’s approach has been to “recognize the most appropriate technology that meets the needs of our customer base at this point in time.”

To learn more about the Open Text Online community and to hear from several community members about their experiences, be sure to check out our latest podcast here: http://www.opentext.com/news/podcasts.html. Even better, subscribe to the ECM News Podcast RSS feed so you don’t miss an episode.