Socialtext today announced that it has built upon its wiki
foundation to launch a broad set of Business Social Software
solutions. Two significant product innovations -- Socialtext Dashboard
and Socialtext People -- extend the wiki platform for people to gain
additional insight by managing their information, conversations and
connections. Socialtext also launched four core Solution Areas:
Business Social Networks, Collaborative Intelligence, Flexible Client
Collaboration and Participatory Knowledgebase. The business social
software launch heralds a new direction for the company, in the works
since CEO Eugene Lee took the helm five months ago.
Socialtext´s four core Solution Areas have been gleaned from five
years of close engagement with enterprise customers and implemented by
a Professional Services organization lead by Michael Idinopulos, a
former McKinsey VP of Knowledge Management. This solutions orientation
is in high demand with an increasing number of organizations looking
to transform their business through social software.
"Wikis are the foundation for business social software, and we are
building the rest of the house," said CEO Eugene Lee. "It starts with
People to make it easier, if not fun, to discover expertise. The
Dashboard lets individuals customize their view of information and
conversations. When combined with our four core Solution Areas
businesses not only realize productivity gains, but insight from their
employees, customers and business partners. What we launched today
shows how we will grow and transform our customer´s business, now and
in the future."
Wikis have emerged as the foundation for Business Social Software
because of their flexibility and simplicity as a collaborative
platform. Socialtext customers continue to benefit from best
practices, templates, features specific to solution areas, training
and management consulting to implement these solutions successfully.
Forrester Research predicts that enterprise spending on Web 2.0
technologies will reach $4.6 billion globally by 2013. According to a
recent Forrester Research report: In 2008, firms will look to invest
in the most well established Web 2.0 tools -- namely, wikis, blogs
and RSS... We expect that as the year progresses, more firms will
start looking at social networking than the number that expects to
today. Not only do most implementations begin with a wiki, but as a
foundation for social software it orients success in collaborative
knowledge sharing.
Socialtext version 3.0 includes:
-- Socialtext Dashboard -- personalized and customizable
dashboards of internal and external social software activity.
The social news feed of your colleague´s activity in wikis and
beyond aids attention management. Enterprise-class and
standards-based widgets, that users can generate, customize
and assemble with a simple drag-and-drop user experience for
what the individual determines productive. Or, starting with
Dashboard Templates for the Four Solution Areas, users, or
central administrators, can create and deploy dashboards for
groups. Socialtext Dashboard supports third party widgets, and
the OpenSocial gadget standard. Socialtext 3.0 also provides
significant enhancements to its open APIs for enterprise
integration
-- Socialtext People -- social networking adapted for the
enterprise. Throughout the Socialtext wiki, Profiles are made
visible so at any time you can pivot to the people behind the
content. Profiles and a user directory make it easy for
colleagues to introduce themselves and discover implicit and
explicit expertise. People can subscribe to the activity of
colleagues. Groupings enable users to declare interest and
expertise on their profile and other users profiles, making
group forming as simple as adding a tag.
The two new enhancements to Socialtext are currently in Beta and
will be commercially available within a quarter. "The founding insight
of Socialtext was adapting innovations from the consumer web that have
great social dynamics into enterprise solutions," said Chairman
President and Co-founder Ross Mayfield. "We foresaw that wikis would
be the foundation, which we are now extending across Business Social
Software."
Socialtext´s unique core competency is extracting value out of the
social patterns within an enterprise context. Socialtext´s service
model has historically had a high level of engagement with premium
customers and practice innovation by Socialtext Professional Services.
Solution-specific implementation results faster and greater adoption
and customer success. The four core Solution Areas derived from
Socialtext´s five years in Business Social Software are:
-- Collaborative Intelligence for sales and marketing, as
implemented for market leaders including Humana and SAP
-- Participatory Knowledgebase for service and support, as
implemented for market leaders including Symantec and
Microstrategy
-- Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services, as
implemented for market leaders including MWW Group and
CoActive Marketing Group
-- Business Social Networks for partners and customers, as
implemented for market leaders including United Business Media
and Epitaph Records
Further information is available on the press wiki
http://socialtext.net/st-press/
About Socialtext
As the Business Social Software leader, Socialtext applies
next-generation Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing
businesses. Web 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing
business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating
tighter connections between employees, partners, and customers. With
the most flexible deployment options in the industry - including
appliances, hosted services, software and open-source - Socialtext
wiki-centric social software solutions are designed for any
organization that wants to accelerate team communications, better
enable knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, and build online
communities. Today, over 4,000 organizations use Socialtext, including
BASF, Boston College, CondeNet, Epitaph Records, IKEA, Humana, Intel
MicroStrategy, MWW Group, Nokia, Ogilvy, SAP, Sunguard, Symantec, USA
Today, Washington Post, among others. More information on Socialtext
can be found at www.socialtext.com.
