Yesterday was a big day for Socialtext and our customers, as we released Socialtext 4.5 at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Socialtext 4.5 builds on our goal of removing knowledge silos inside companies that stifle cross-departmental and enterprise-wide collaboration. As I write this post, my fellow Socialtexters are setting up our booth and hitting the conference sessions to talk with business and IT leaders about how they can get the most business value from social software.

First a little context on the news yesterday. Socialtext proudly operates as a software as a service company. We also run on an innovative, agile development cycle. That means we make improvements to our software every few weeks. Consequently, 4.5 highlighted many of the major features that our dev team has been hard at work on the past couple quarters. Like all our releases, our devs and product team do a great job of listening closely to our customers to put together features and improvements that help them accelerate their company’s business performance with social software.

With 4.5, we announced the addition of Socialtext Explore, a new feature that allows employees to find and discover not just links, but all the microblogging messages, pages, posts, pictures, and files they share with each other at work. We also announced a pre-built connector to Salesforce.com, which enables Socialtext customers to choose actions of virtually any type that happen in Salesforce.com, and automatically inject them as events into Socialtext’s activity stream. The connector was built on Socialtext Connect, our integration offering that allows you to integrate traditional enterprise systems with social software. Connect enables customers to build their own connectors to systems of all shapes and sizes. The Salesforce.com connector follows the launch of SharePoint Connector for Socialtext Connect earlier this year.

We were excited to see extensive coverage on Socialtext 4.5 from great media outlets like TechCrunch, CIO, InformationWeek, ReadWriteWeb and many others, and I encourage you to take a glance (the deeplinks lead to the article for those respective publications).

Also yesterday, our president and co-founder, Ross Mayfield, co-hosted the Enterprise 2.0 Bar Camp with industry luminary Susan Scrupski of the 2.0 Adoption Council. By nature, BarCamp is designed as an “unconference,” where attendees literally create their own sessions based on topics of interest. One cool thing about BarCamp this year is that it falls a little after the fifth anniversary of the first BarCamp, which was held at Socialtext Headquarters in Palo Alto.

Ross led a session about “bringing enterprise 1.0 to enterprise 2.0,” in which we had some spirited conversation with attendees about how to align social software with existing business processes. Ross highlighted what has long been a passion for him and guided much of his thought leadership in pioneering the Enterprise 2.0 space: How social software can help exceptions to business process. This topic relates to a webinar we had recently, in which the Deloitte Center for the Edge discussed how OSIsoft (a Socialtext customer) improved its customer resolution time by 22 percent. We also recently highlighted how an accounting firm, Hayes Knight, utilized Socialtext Connect to tie its CRM system into a central activity stream. In that case, accountants cut the time in which they served customers in half.

We’re looking forward to watching our customer, Larry Housel of Industrial Mold & Machine, talk tomorrow about how large enterprises can learn from his company’s use of social software. On Thursday, Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee will discuss the state of microblogging in the enterprise, while Adina Levin, our co-founder and VP of products, will talk about using open web standards to help integrate social software with other key applications across the enterprise.

/cgl