Socialtext launched a major platform refresh, adding support for Google Analytics, and IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communicator instant messaging products.
Socialtext Feb. 24 launched its annual refresh of
its software platform, this time adding instant messaging support for IBM and
Microsoft programs, as well as business analytics from Google.
Socialtext
software allows business users to build corporate intranets that allow workers
to collaborate via modern communication tools, including private and shared
workspaces, chat and status updates. Employees at Getty Images, Symantec and
more than 6,000 other businesses use these tools to share information with
their colleagues.
While many
enterprise software makers of late are preaching cloud-only software
approaches, Socialtext offers a Web-based solution and an on-premises software
appliance that sits behind the customer's firewall.
Socialtext 4.6
now integrates with IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communicator
instant messaging products to allow customers to conduct real-time, one-to-one
chats with their business contacts. Sametime and Communicator join AIM Yahoo
and Skype as instant messaging tools Socialtext supports.
Socialtext
also
offers a Signals microblog service, a sort of
enterprise-grade Twitter, that puts Socialtext in competition with Socialcast,
Yammer and Salesforce.com's Chatter.
The software
maker now lets users see and share videos from YouTube and Vimeo, slideshow
presentations from SlideShare and other multimedia with the whole company or
smaller groups without leaving the Signals application. Workers can then
comment on the content and exchange suggestions for improvement and other
ideas.
Signals also
now incorporates notifications so that workers can see messages from colleagues
without leaving the application they're using. This feature, available for
users who access Socialtext via Google's Chrome Web browser, may also be used
via a Mozilla Firefox extension.
The software
also now integrates with Google Analytics to provide IT administrators more
relevant, detailed information about the content workers are sharing in a
Socialtext "dashboard" workspace. Administrators may see which pages
people are accessing, how they arrived at them, how long they stayed and where
they went next.
Administrators
can also "gather information about the locations people live in, the
browsers they are using and even their screen resolutions. These details can
help companies measure and optimize their intranets, leading to higher levels
of adoption and increasing business value."
Although these
details might trigger privacy concerns in the case of a corporate security
breach, Socialtext has had a solid track record in that department since its
inception in 2002.
Indeed, the
venerable Socialtext competes with Jive Software, IBM Lotus Connections,
Mindtouch, Mzinga and dozens of other younger social software suites in the
lucrative business social software market.
Gartner
forecasts that the worldwide market for
enterprise social software will top $769 million in 2011 and possibly $1
billion through 2012.
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