SAP this week took a step forward in merging the world of enterprise systems and social media, announcing plans to integrate its 14-month-old StreamWork social collaboration tool with all of its enterprise applications. The move, however, raises a question for manufacturers planning enterprise social media strategies: Should they select social platforms that are closely tied to enterprise application eco-systems such as SAP's? Or should social software be conceived and implemented more broadly as platforms that integrate equally with a wide range of enterprise resources and users?

SAP's StreamWork, which favors a project management approach to social collaboration, already integrates with SAP applications such as its product lifecycle management, CRM, and strategy management modules. Jack Miller, the company's group vice president for collaboration told me yesterday that the company is also committing to integrating StreamWork across all of SAP's applications, begining next year with the company's business intelligence suite.The move, which follows the addition last December of a more secure enterprise version of StreamWork, means that users and teams will be able to easily download and update data from SAP applications into SteamWork. They can then more easily collaborate around that data.

But, said Miller, SAP at this point doesn't have plans to directly integrate StreamWork with other enterprise application environments. StreamWork comes with an open API that has been used to integrate the platform with some other social tools such as Google Docs and Evernote. But SAP isn't commiting to integrating StreamWork with non-SAP ERP, HRM, asset management, or other systems.

SAP rival Oracle is expected to take a similar approach, embedding some social capabilities into its coming Fusion Applications products.

This presents manufacturers with a choice: Select a social platform that is closely associated with their enterprise applications environment, or opt for a platform such as Microsoft's Sharepoint or Jive. Or support multiple social collaboration platforms.

What is your company's strategy for deploying social collaboration? Does an enterprise application-centric social media approach make sense for your company? What about the idea of supporting multiple social collaboration platforms?