Today, we’ve taken another step towards our vision of a fully connected, internal network, with the announcement of a partnership with NetDocuments. This partnership provides our customers with the ability to create, share and manage documents through the native Socialtext interface. As an industry-leading cloud content management provider, NetDocuments is a great partner to work with towards this vision.
Our client, Climateworks Foundation, is a non-profit organization that prevents dangerous climate change globally. They initially approached us to develop a social knowledge exchange that would allow partners across their global network to share information and learn from each other in order to quickly and effectively execute against initiatives. Sarah Nichols, director of knowledge management at ClimateWorks, envisioned a solution that would inspire different non-profit and philanthropic agencies around the world to collaborate and share ideas to improve the network’s success as a whole. And thus, a partnership was born.

By integrating Socialtext functionality with ClimateWorks’ existing structured NetDocuments content management system, practitioners are now able to customize the organization of their information, create content together, maintain version control and easily connect with one another to share information and new ideas.
At Socialtext we’re continuing to drive our vision of the “social layer”, making all systems of record easily accessible for social collaboration and enabling more efficient execution of business initiatives. Our partnership with NetDocuments, in addition to our existing integration with systems such as salesforce.com and Microsoft Sharepoint, underscores our progress in moving towards developing a fully connected, internal network.

And as always we’re excited about working with smart customers like Climateworks and great partners like NetDocuments.

For more information about our partnership with NetDocuments, please see our release here.

SOPA, which has been dropped for the time being, represents a fundamental change in the way the Internet works today and could undermine all SaaS companies and working in the Enterprise 2.0 space. This poses a great threat to many enterprise social networking providers, such as Socialtext who have shared hosting with their customers. Additionally, if this bill was passed, it could have broken-down the advancements made in international business if other countries followed suit and disabled the ability to provide services globally.

At Socialtext, customers use our technology to interact and share socially across the enterprise, from marketing to customer support, engineering, research and more. We were the first company to deliver enterprise social software and are focused on delivering a SaaS platform that enables social collaboration, allowing employees to share knowledge with their colleagues and teams. In addition to sharing internal knowledge and documents, customers also share information off the web, which can pose a problem if the sites and/or content shared comes from a site deemed infringed. In result, customers (especially those using extranets) would have to self-police themselves or face substantial penalties.

After strong protests and, according to PC World, $4.5 million people signing the Google anti-SOPA and PIPA petition, the bill is currently being assessed and reworked. So, what does the future hold for Internet security? Will OPEN gain more ground than its predecessors, SOPA and PIPA? Only time will tell as SOPA sponsor and Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) continues to work on getting an antipiracy legislation passed.

For more thoughts on this please check out my special guest piece, “SOPA: Dead but Not Forgotten” on TMCnet.com and featured interview on Technorati.

The ability to assemble teams around a new business challenge is a use-case that has flourished the past year. Whether it’s a pitch team for an advertising RFP, a launch team for a new product introduction, a cross-functional team investigating new market opportunities, or a consulting team for a new client – all of these scenarios share some core, common questions:

• “Who has worked with this client or customer before?”
• “Who knows their industry issues?”
• “Who has expertise and experience in specific technical skill XYZ?”
• “Who is a well-regarded thought leader in issue XYZ?”

And so on.

Most people presume that using enterprise social networking to assemble teams inside a company would be based on a LinkedIn or Facebook type of model, but we don’t find that practical.

Let me explain why.

Facebook and LinkedIn are symmetric networks based on mutual “friending.” Symmetry in those social networks works because it strengthens intimacy and increases confidence to share. But because corporate social networks need to be transparent, you can see everyone that a colleague friends anyway, making this model less useful. It can cause corporate networks to devolve into what I call the “VP Trading Card collection game.” (See my post, Will you be my friend – yes or no?). In other words, you friend people for reasons of status; not because they’re the right people to help you get your work done and serve customers.

More importantly, most people logically assume that the way to make sure you can find people with the right attributes (answers to the above questions) is to ensure that their profiles are rich and thoroughly populated. Unfortunately, this relies on people filling out dozens of profile fields, most of which they might not update after their first day on the job. Consequently, what I do and what you say about me trumps what I say about myself.

Socialtext People, our profile capability, takes a different approach for some important philosophical and strategic reasons.

• What I say about myself (my profile) is really just an “opening bid.”
• What others say about me (Tags on my profile and how my colleagues interact with me in the Activity Stream) is much more interesting
• What I DO (my activity stream generated by my in-the-flow-of-work actions) is the MOST relevant set of information about me – what I do, what I say, who I work with, and on which topics

Vote with my attention, not my politics

Moreover, we’ve adopted an ASYMMETRIC social networking model (ie Twitter’s “follow” instead of Facebook’s “friend” model) – anyone can follow me, and I don’t need to “approve” them. And I can follow anyone. This leads to a much more scalable network for the transmission of signals with much less noise (See Tim O’Reilly’s excellent post Goodreads vs. Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow). It also avoids funky unintended political behavior (see my post A different kind of social capital at work – Attention especially for a humor interlude from Geek ‘n Poke).

For example, if a VP of marketing limits his or her network to other VPs and senior directors, that person might miss out on some valuable information or knowledge held by someone lower in the organizational hierarchy. So if that marketing VP was working on, say, a strategy to reach new markets in Asia, they may want to start following someone in business development or the new sales rep based in China. These other colleagues may not be as “powerful” as the Marketing VP, but their updates may be far more relevant to what that VP is working on.

It’s these kinds of connections that can lead to the elimination of silos and true business transformation inside a company.

As business models in the Enterprise 2.0 world evolve, we’ve examined how we can streamline our sales, trial and provisioning process to get companies up and running even faster. The launch of the Socialtext Virtual Appliance — a VMware image that contains the most current version of Socialtext — created a huge opportunity for us to move in that direction.

So today, we’re announcing two new offerings that build on that vision.

1. The Virtual Appliance Trial

Launching in May, prospective Socialtext customers can select, try, evaluate and buy their Socialtext solution by downloading the Virtual Appliance directly from Socialtext.com. This delivers IT a full private instance of the Socialtext platform, without encountering any of the friction that hardware-supported, traditional, behind-the-firewall deployments usually entail. It also gives companies the ability to host their data as they try Socialtext, something we know the market craves as some freemium models hold IT captive to buy their data back from vendors.

2. Expanding channel partner programs

Today we’re also announcing the ability of a new distribution channel via our partner program. In addition to our referral, reseller and integrator partners, we’ll be rolling out the ability to distribute Socialtext via a network of OEM Partners. In doing so, we’re making it easier for traditional application vendors to make Socialtext a social layer that spans the entire enterprise. To learn more, please e-mail partners@socialtext.com.

As we are now in a position to insert scale and leverage into our business model better than ever before, we have reorganized our resources in the way to best capitalize on these opportunities. We look forward to passing the benefits of scale and leverage on to our customers, and to the exciting work in the months ahead.

But unlike other SaaS companies, we’re not cloud zealots in the traditional sense. Since we’ve been delivering enterprise social software longer than any company in this space, we know IT has strict requirements that dictates the critical information shared on Socialtext be stored securely behind the firewall in their private cloud. We understand the requirements for synchronizing with corporate directories, providing single-sign-on solutions and integration with other enterprise applications.

Today’s announcement that you can run Socialtext on VMware is meant to support that freedom of choice and convenience. It complements our existing deployment options, which includes traditional hosting (single or multi-tenant), and a secure appliance box that hooks into a company’s existing infrastructure.

The best part: No matter if our customers choose the Socialtext cloud or their own private cloud, they receive all the updates and upgrades from us. Just because you want your data on-site doesn’t mean you should have a high total cost of ownership that sucks up IT resources, time, and money.

We also think VMware really helps companies leverage their computing resources as they scale social software throughout the enterprise. The elastic way in which you can scale VMware made it a perfect fit for the Socialtext virtual appliance, and we were delighted to have them join us in today’s news.

We love giving our customers choices, and the Virtual Appliance is another option in the Socialtext arsenal that we’re really proud of.

Starting several months ago, we noticed an exciting pattern amidst many of newer customers: Their usage and adoption rates were accelerating on a curve previously unseen by us, or, frankly, most Enterprise 2.0 use cases for that matter.

Interestingly, several of these customers didn’t have grandiose plans of transforming their intranet. They merely sought to leverage social software to solve specific pain points their businesses faced. They were engaging in what our VP of customer success, Michael Idinopulos, would refer to as “In the flow of work” collaboration. They also wanted to eliminate knowledge and information silos that hampered business performance. In one case, the head of worldwide sales tasked about 200 people from his team, product marketing, and sales ops to improve training materials and product launches. In another case, we saw a broad, horizontal deployment to modernize knowledge sharing across disparate teams and functions.

But after launching these focused deployments, word spread fast.

Why?

Other employees looked at their intranets and realized what it was missing: People.

Pretty soon, employees outside the targeted usage groups at these companies started asking why they couldn’t have the same easy-to-use social applications in their intranet. Why did they have to tolerate the static, frustrating, and out-of-date intranet that was in place?

We’ve seen two results from their requests. Some of our customers have actually replaced the front door to their intranet with Socialtext – particularly with Socialtext Dashboard as the starting point. Dashboard allows people to not only access tools within Socialtext to connect with colleagues and share content, but they can also access other systems, applications and sites across their company. Others, though it wasn’t their intention at the onset, scrapped their intranet entirely and moved to Socialtext. These customers have transformed the look and feel of their intranet by injecting social patterns into it. Employees can share via microblogging, self-publish through blogs, collaborate on wikis, and form groups across organizational boundaries.

Meanwhile, my team also noticed a trend in the language used by our sales prospects. They began hearing phrases like “Our intranet stinks” or “No one can find anything in our intranet.” Just yesterday, I talked with the CIO of a large company who said, “We call our intranet ‘The Junk Drawer.’” Last month, we did a webinar called “Your Social Intranet – The Place Where Work Gets Done.” During the event, we ran a fun contest to see who could propose the funniest David Letterman-style “Top 10 ways you know your Intranet needs updating.” The visceral and sarcastic nature of the submissions we received speaks volumes about people’s frustration with current intranets. (More on that in future posts.)

So the new features that we’ve rolled up into Socialtext 4.6 are really the result of focusing our development and innovation through this lens – helping make your intranet more social. We’re doing as much as we can to make PEOPLE be a first-class object in your intranet. As a result, we can make the intranet be a place where people go to get work done together — not just a place to try to find information, documents, and application links.

First and foremost, this was driven from conversations with our customers and prospects. It’s not meant to be vendor jockeying. Like us, these companies hold a philosophical difference with Yammer for how technology should be purchased and deployed throughout the enterprise, and this service is meant to help them transition to Socialtext as painlessly and cost effectively as possible.

There are 2 main themes that emerged from these conversations:

1. The business model of “free for users, but charge IT for control” just doesn’t sit well with many of the IT folks we work with. The unplanned, unbudgeted cost is at odds with the way IT works in most mid-to-large businesses.
2. Compliance and security concerns mean many customers need microblogging deployed behind their firewall.

Many of them don’t want to engage in this publicly because it would expose the fact that valuable data was being traded across their network (on a free version of Yammer), only to find out they had to pay for the seats already in use to get control of that data. It doesn’t feel good, and it’s something we believe has frustrated many people in the market. At Socialtext, our customers (and their respective IT leaders) always own their data — before, during and after their time as paying customers.

So we’re responding to the needs that an increasing number of customers and prospects have presented to us. Socialtext has a history of positive go-to-market strategies, both publicly with our marketing campaigns and privately in our sales conversations, reflecting the respect we have for our competitors. As in any competitive market, we are attacking similar problems using different approaches. This service is a reflection of that difference.

On a high level, we made a strategic bet with Socialtext Connect that an embrace of Open Web standards and REST APIs will make it easier for companies to integrate their traditional systems with social applications.

Here are four reasons we have made bets on the open web in the enterprise.

1. REST APIs — We’re developing to where the puck will be, not where it’s been. We’re helping channel the wave of open web standards inside the enterprise firewall. A large number of enterprise IT departments have been rethinking their approach to their enterprise architecture, using REST instead of SOAP – for faster and more agile development cycles, better scalability, and cleaner separation between client/device and server/service. We’ve focused on REST as our API strategy from the very beginning, and we’re doubling down on that bet with Socialtext Connect.
2. Bringing architectural patterns, not just Twitter and Facebook, from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 — We continue to monitor emerging patterns in the consumer Web 2.0 space for relevant value within the enterprise firewall. The most recent of these are Twitter Annotations, Webhooks, and activitystrea.ms – all of which we’re incorporating into Socialtext Connect. Our co-founder, Adina Levin, has also blogged about the power and usefulness of these standards in the enterprise.
3. To escape application silos, the Social Layer needs to be usable by non-users of applications — Ease of use remains key – application streams and App Bots are designed to facilitate productive, context-based conversation around reports, events, and exceptions in the underlying application, by injecting these into what was previously only a channel for conversation between people. AppBots aren’t just persona that “tweet” – they are interactive agents that can respond to queries and drilldowns by users – all of which contributes rich context to the overall conversation about a specific event or exception. This video can highlight what I mean.
4. We’re trying to straddle and connect the applications and social worlds without binding you to either — With regards to integration and architecture, we take a different approach that our competitors in the Enterprise 2.0 world. Some believe that social technology should be an add-on feature to their departmental application, and therefore produce a programming model that’s an extension of their application model. Others think social software should be a heavyweight Java container, where you pour your development resources, time and money. Our objective is to enable you to liberate information, events, and transactions from application silos and the user community silos that are captive to them – by liberating your development resources from a monolithic, stack-bound development model.

By embracing open web standards and making social a layer in the enterprise architecture, we’re already seeing how this can play out with our customers. As we shared recently, Hayes Knight, an accounting consultancy in Australia, used Socialtext Connect to integrate their CRM system with Socialtext Signals to make it easier and faster for the company’s accountants to collaborate and answer important customer questions.

“The speed with which we’re answering questions has been cut in half, and is a full 7−8 minutes faster on average,” says CTO Jack Pedzikiewicz, a very active member of our SocialDev community, which shares best practices on Socialtext Connect. “The wonderful thing is, as we capture these great answers inside of Socialtext workspaces, we also cut back on repetition where questions cover the same issue and build best of breed responses and knowledge on key issues of importance. It allows us to serve our customers faster and more consistently.”

We believe Hayes Knight’s success is just the beginning, and look forward to sharing more customer stories in the coming months.

•    ”Social software is an entirely new way to work!”
•    ”We can break free of the tyranny of email.”
•    ”Web 2.0 is so much easier to use than those clunky old enterprise applications – and Enterprise 2.0 means we don’t have to use them any more.”

Passionate evangelism often stimulates new movements. Enterprise 2.0 has been no exception. Our company played a big part in creating the enthusiasm you see in the corporate world for social technologies, and that’s a point of pride for us. But although the enterprise social software space has enjoyed incredible growth and the pace of innovation continues at an amazing clip, it’s also important to take a long, more pragmatic view to the future, one that considers the realities of the customers we serve and the investments they’ve made in past years.

Of course it’s true that the Web 2.0 movement created a new way to think about software, stimulating all of us to ask “why do I get a better software experience from Netflix and Amazon.com than from my own IT organization?” The explosive growth of blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have given hundreds of millions of people a great willingness to share, which many Enterprise 2.0 vendors (Socialtext included) are capitalizing on. And yes, for much of the early phases of this industry, a lot has been accomplished with almost no regard for those very applications that have frustrated employees for so many years.

But it’s important to keep in mind that the real problems that enterprise social software helps organizations overcome are information and knowledge silos – that huge benefits are reaped by unlocking and releasing information and knowledge across teams, groups, departments, functional organizations, business units, and even company boundaries. We’ve made it simple (yet secure) for employees to cross those boundaries by riding the cross-organizational communications wave that social software enables, with compelling results. This is one of the most important ways that enterprise social software is more than just “yet another attempt to improve collaboration.” Yes, it’s great for team and workgroup productivity, but the greatest benefit accrues when it is explicitly and proactively spread across the gaps between organizational (and the attending information and communications) silos.

For those of us who believe in the transformative power of social software, we must now think about how to make social productivity more substantial, by weaving the ability for enterprise social software to release information and knowledge that was previously trapped in organizational and communications silos together with the transactional and workflow capabilities that 80% of IT budgets are spent maintaining – traditional enterprise systems of record (CRM, ERP, HRM, etc.) We should work with and integrate, not ignore, these enterprise applications in an holistic way.

As we undergo the challenge of rectifying the new with the old, I worry there’s some trends underway in our space that would undermine that effort. A common question that I’m asked by analysts and journalists should elucidate what I’m getting at: “Well, why don’t the big boys just add social features to their existing enterprise applications? Isn’t it a simple matter of programming to add Twitter-like functionality to an existing enterprise application, giving customers the best of both worlds?”

Indeed, traditional enterprise application vendors such as Salesforce.com with Chatter and SAP with 12Sprints have caught the “social is sexy” fever. They have bolted social features onto their existing application, trumpeting how this social skin will make their software easier and more fun to use, stickier, and more engaging.

While we have applauded their embrace of social technologies, and the validation and enthusiasm (Salesforce.com in particular) brings to the Enterprise 2.0 world, the long term consequence of an enterprise making this their social software strategy will cause us to miss the opportunity of true enterprise wide collaboration that can have a transformative effect on core business processes. That’s because if social tools are just a feature add-on to an enterprise system dedicated to a specific business function, it doesn’t look pretty when we fast-forward that movie. The end result will be a plethora of social silos or islands — groups of employees sharing and communicating in their app-specific community, walled off from the rest of the enterprise.

But wait – weren’t information and knowledge silos the very thing social software should help us remove at our companies?

Don’t get me wrong. I think Chatter is really cool… for those few companies who have every employee on Salesforce.com. But for most companies, the real value of social software rests in surfacing information and events from all their company’s various systems, and pulling that into a central stream where all of their employees, not just those housed in the sales and support departments, can collaborate, take action, and drive new business opportunities.

We believe we can avoid the fate of information silos by building a “Social Layer” in the enterprise architecture. The social layer will span all employees across all organizational boundaries, and connect them to key enterprise applications beneath it in the architectural stack. We recently introduced Socialtext Connect, which is the beginning of our approach to enabling this Social Layer.

In my next post, I’ll be drilling into some of the architectural approaches to connecting enterprise social software to existing enterprise applications – across application silos – in order to make The Social Layer a reality.

Enterprise 2.0 requires much deeper thinking than merely copying Web 2.0 patterns, throwing in a little SSL and email integration, and charging money for it. In order for enterprise social software to enjoy long term success, vendors must recognize the importance of security, privacy, identity, IT policies and procedures, and architectural fit, etc. The entire team at Socialtext has deep enterprise pedigrees, and that experience has been key to the robust architectural and design choices we’ve made over the years.

In our early days, we learned a great deal about the dynamic tension between privacy and collaboration from pioneering the use of wikis in the enterprise. On one hand, we learned that too much privacy is an anti-pattern for collaboration and social software adoption. For example, if different pages in the same workspace have different privacy settings, people can get very confused about who can see or edit which content. On the other hand, we also learned that granular privacy can dramatically encourage collaboration because it helps people feel comfortable about the context of the group and the people with whom they are sharing. People naturally understand what’s appropriate to be shared in the “virtual watercooler” or “social intranet,” while the “Leadership Huddle Workspace” gives executives the confidence to discuss confidential or sensitive topics without worrying about leaks.

As we embarked on building out our complete Enterprise social software suite, we wanted to build a sophisticated privacy model into the architecture. It’s important for privacy rules and patterns of user experience to be as consistent as possible. This is key not only for enforcement, but also for adoption. I’m pretty proud of how well this has held up since we introduced Socialtext 3.0 back in September 2008, and especially since we rolled out our enterprise microblogging capability, Socialtext Signals.

To illustrate our privacy strength, take a look at how we implemented “Edit Summary,” which lets you summarize your edits to a wiki page. Some examples of edit summaries you might write: “Added links to Mike Gotta’s blog post” or “reorganized the lead paragraph.” Alongside edit summaries, we added a nice little feature called “Signal this edit”. If you choose to “signal this edit,” Socialtext sends the text of your edit summary out as a Signal (a short microblogging message) to your colleagues.– That signal will also contain a link back to the page you just edited. And it’s here where privacy safeguards are so important. What if the page you were editing was in a confidential workspace called “Acquisition Planning,” and the page was titled “Functions to be combined and reduced”? Could someone accidentally Signal this edit to the whole company?

The answer is no, and that’s because of the Socialtext platform’s underlying privacy architecture. The Signal you send, regardless of how broadly you send it (accidentally even), will only be visible to those people who have view privileges to that confidential workspace. From a technical perspective, this privacy is enforced on the server side. It is not an exercise left to the developer writing client-side code, a key to enforcing privacy rules in a consistent manner.

Privacy is a design pattern in the Socialtext platform. It applies to visibility (who can see a Signal, a group, a page) and participation (public vs. private vs. semi-private groups). This is on top of the fact that security is a core capability of our platform – whether it’s our shared hosted service, or our SaaS appliance that customers install inside their own firewalls. We’ve been thinking about and working on this for a long time – Adina Levin has written a few blog posts on the importance of privacy in enterprise social software, which I encourage you to read: Data Sharing, Context, and Privacy, What’s Different about Enterprise Twitter?, and Enterprise OpenSocial – A Year of Progress

But we never waver in our attention to these issues. We’re constantly listening to our customers and industry experts to see how we can make it better. It excites us that our customers do mission critical work inside our product, and our team constantly makes improvements in our agile development cycle to keep up with their complex privacy and security requirements.