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    Customer SuccessEnterprise 2.0

    Chicago Enterprise Social Networking Event Wrap Up

    By   |  May 26, 2011, 3:22 pm  |  0 Comments

    Last night, we hosted an enterprise social networking event in Chicago as part of an ongoing series to highlight best practices shared by Socialtext customers.

    It followed our event in New York in April featuring the CIO of NYU Stern (which you can read about here).

    Jack MacKay, VP and CIO of the American Hospital Association, led last night’s discussion at Harry Caray’s in Chicago, and it was a great one. Jack shared how the AHA has built a vibrant social intranet running on Socialtext.

    The reason for AHA’s success: Utilizing enterprise social networking to enhance existing business processes and systems. Using Socialtext Connect, our integration technology, the AHA integrated key HR and document management systems into its social intranet, making it a place where work gets done inside the company. I uploaded the slides to SlideShare so you can get more of the details.

    American Hospital Association Social Intranet & Collaboration Platform

    After the presentation, other Socialtext customers — including FONA International and Hospira — joined in a roundtable discussion about fostering adoption and value from their enterprise social networking efforts.

    We’re looking forward to the next event, and appreciate everyone who came out and contributed to a great discussion.

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    Customer SuccessTips & Tricks

    Podcast About Socialtext and the Social Software Industry

    By   |  May 25, 2011, 5:03 pm  |  0 Comments

    Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Lisa Duke on the “Get Social. Do Business” podcast. It’s an hour long, so I’ve included a timeline of the topics discussed to help you jump around to the areas that interest you the most.

    Download episode as MP3

    00:45 – 06:03 – Alan’s background and move from IBM to Socialtext (skip this!)

    06:20 – 09:16 – Socialtext’s background and beliefs. How Socialtext decides what to build and how we implement features with enterprise needs and business benefits in mind. It’s not just taking the latest consumer buzzword and making an internal version of it.

    10:05 – Overview of Socialtext’s features and benefits. How social software helps people share information, get answers to questions, find people and content to help them get work done.
    11:28 – 15:06 Dashboards, Activity Streams, Microblogging (Socialtext Signals) = Social Intranet that helps connect people and content
    15:07 – 19:02 Workspaces where wiki pages and online spreadsheets are used to turn business processes into social applications.

    20:45 – 24:00 – The key to success with social software is integrating the new tools into the existing processes that run your business.

    25:50 – 30:40 – Socialtext’s SaaS deployment and access options: Hosted (single-tenet or multi-tenet) or on-premises (hardware appliance or VMware) – web browser, Adobe AIR desktop client or mobile browser access.

    32:45 – 38:00 – Understanding SaaS based product updates – How “we’re running on an old version” is a thing of the past. Removing any fear that an IT department has about new versions.

    40:15 – 46:00 – What’s the role of business partners in the ecosystem of the social software world? Partner opportunities include reselling software, building add-on tools, adding specialized functionality, building connectors to other systems, etc. Gone are the days where consultants make big money for installing, upgrading, configuring and managing systems. (unless the customer is using a Java or .Net based platform)

    50:00 – 51:30 – So if partners don’t have to install/configure/maintain systems, then what does a “services team” do? It’s more about business consulting, helping customers integrate social software into business processes.

    51:45 – 54:50 – What are some of Socialtext’s competitive advantages? Frequent release schedules. Multiple deployment options. Established thought leaders in social software and understanding customer needs. Reputation for being a good “partner” to our customers, not an arrogant vendor. Simple to purchase and get up and running quickly. (note: I forgot to mention our awesome API!)

    55:20 – 1:01:45 – What benefits are customers seeing? How is Socialtext helping their businesses? (see: http://www.socialtext.com/customers/) People being able to find content and colleagues helps them get their job done better, leading to faster customer response times, better internal communication, sharing of ideas, etc. Stories about Getty Images, Epitaph Records, Industrial Perfection Mold & Machine, ISS Mexico, FONA, and more.

    1:01:50 – 1:04:30 Using Socialtext for extranets with your customers (B2B) – ex: GT Nexus. How communities can interact not only with the vendor, but also with other customers.

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    Customer SuccessNews & Events

    Socialtext Is #1 and Now Runs On VMware

    By   |  April 27, 2011, 5:54 pm  |  0 Comments

    Below is a recap of some of the exciting news here at Socialtext, including us recently being named the #1 Enterprise 2.0 vendor. The timing could not be better, as organizations around the world are looking towards social software to help improve the way people connect with colleagues, customers and content. I’ve included information about our newest deployment option, Socialtext on VMware and several customer stories that showcase how Socialtext is helping their businesses. If you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you. Alan Lepofsky, Director of Product Marketing

    Introducing The Socialtext Virtual Appliance

    Leveraging Social Software in Your Private Cloud

    As one of the leading SaaS providers, Socialtext firmly believes in the importance of cloud based solutions. However, our experience has taught us that some companies have strict IT requirement which dictate that all information be stored behind the firewall in their private cloud.

    To meet these needs, Socialtext has just introduced our Virtual Appliance on VMware. It complements our existing deployment options, which includes traditional hosting (single or multi-tenant), as well as a secure server appliance. Our new VMware option helps companies leverage their existing computing resources as they scale social software throughout the enterprise.

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

    Socialtext Is #1

    At the start of April, InformationWeek released the results of their Enterprise 2.0 Vendor Evaluation Survey, and Socialtext was ranked #1 in overall performance. It’s important to note that this was not an analyst report conducted via vendor interviews. Instead the results are based on the feedback of more than 600 IT professionals, business people just like you. Our winning performance in this report reinforces our belief that the effectiveness of tools is not based on a checklist of features, but by integrating social software into the core-business processes. We’re proud of our results and would like to thank everyone who relies on our solutions to help make their organization successful. Read more…

    Customer Success

    This month we have several new customer success stories to share with you. First is The ClimateWorks Foundation, a global organization that helps prevent dangerous climate change tied to global warming. With teams focused on transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy and more, ClimateWorks needed a central, secure place to harness knowledge and share ideas openly across these sectors. The full story on how ClimateWorks uses Socialtext as their social intranet can be found here. Second is ISS Mexico, the country’s largest provider of cleaning, maintenance and catering services. With 20 offices spread throughout the country, IIS Mexico turned to Socialtext to help them connect people with the colleagues and information they require to get their jobs done. Learn more about the benefits IIS Mexico is experiencing, here. Finally, Forrester Research has just published a new paper highlighting the importance of integration between enterprise systems of record and social tools. In it they highlight Socialtext customer Hayes Knight, explaining how they have integrated Socialtext into the core business processes their accountants and advisors use to answer the tax and auditing questions asked by their customers. Read more about how Hayes Knight uses Socialtext to create a “social layer” across their applications here.

    Socialtext Cross Country Tour

    On April 14th, we kicked off our cross country tour in New York City. The goal of these events is to provide attendees information presented by our customers, not sales pitches from us. They hear about real world implementations and learn about proven business results. In NYC, our main speaker was Anand Padmanabhan, CIO of NYU Stern School of Business. Anand and his team has deployed social software to nearly 10,000 faculty, students, and staff at NYU Stern, fundamentally transforming communication between those constituencies. Read more about the event, including Anand’s slides here. Our next event is being held in Chicago. To find out details of upcoming events in a city near you, don’t hesitate to contact me our your account team.

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    Customer Success

    ISS Mexico Brings People to the Forefront with Social Intranet

    By   |  April 21, 2011, 6:05 pm  |  0 Comments

    We’ve been noticing an exciting trend amidst our customer base: They’ve been making their intranets social. We saw a great presentation from the American Hospital Association back in January about how they’ve built a social intranet on Socialtext, and today I’m happy to share the story of another.

    This morning, we published a new case study about ISS Mexico. Headquarted in Mexico City, ISS Facility Service Mexico is the largest and leading integrated provider in Mexico for cleaning, maintenance and catering services, and has 20 offices spread throughout the country.

    I’ll let you read the case study, but in summary, ISS Mexico wanted to provide a place to connect people with relevant colleagues and information, enabling them to adapt key business processes quickly and flexibly.

    Some key takeaways: ISS Mexico has enjoyed great adoption by identifying key business processes that could be moved into their social intranet, ensuring it’s a technology that employees use to perform their best work together.

    “Adoption happened pretty naturally,” Erick Vera, Enterprise Social Media Manager at ISS Mexico, told me. “People were amazed that they could get all this information about their colleagues in other offices that they’d never had before, both what they were interested in, and all the things they’re working on.”

    Enjoy the case study, and let us know if you have any questions about ISS Mexico’s use case or any others. We keep a good well of them here on our customer page.

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    Application DevelopmentCustomer SuccessEnterprise 2.0

    Forrester Research: How Socialtext Customer Hayes Knight Built the Social Layer

    By   |  April 20, 2011, 6:38 pm  |  0 Comments

    Last June, Eugene, our CEO, delivered a keynote talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston called “The Social Layer.” The concept was simple: Social software should be a layer of technology that spans an entire organization, pulling together relevant people, content and systems of record in one easy place. It wasn’t about us or any one vendor; it was about moving the industry forward.

    To do our part, however, we introduced Socialtext Connect, an integration technology that lets you surface critical events from enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, etc.) and inject them into the Socialtext platform, where employees from across your organization can collaborate and take action. To get started, we delivered two pre-built integrations to Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com.

    But Rob Koplowitz, the lead Enterprise 2.0 analyst at Forrester Research, didn’t just have to take our word for it: In his latest research note, Rob and his team featured Hayes Knight, a customer of ours in Australia that has used Connect to integrate key systems of record with Socialtext, including a homegrown job management system (built on Microsoft .Net) and CRM data from Salesforce.com. (The Forrester report focuses on the first system, and we have a blog post on the CRM integration, which enables Hayes Knight to serve customers 50 percent faster).

    When I visited Hayes Knight’s headquarters in Sydney back in November, I remember being amazed at how much they’d done with Socialtext Connect and our REST API. At the time, Jack Pedzikiewicz, our champion there, told me his favorite part of our platform was its flexibility, and this report does a great job of highlighting it.

    A quick except:

    Every trend needs a trailblazer, and in the case of establishing an integrated social layer that facilitates core operation processes, Hayes Knight is at the forefront. A group of companies offering accounting, business strategy, and complex tax services, Hayes Knight makes its living from the production and distribution of high-end knowledge. And it does so in Australia, one of the strictest compliance environments in the world.

    Like most organizations, Hayes Knight has legacy systems in place to handle key business functions. Yet most systems were largely transactional in nature, and Hayes Knight’s work product was anything but transactional. Jack Pedzikiewicz took on the task of turning the culture to one of knowledge capture, sharing, and collective decision-making while maintaining the context provided by the company’s core business systems.

    Pedzikiewicz targeted several of Hayes Knight’s core business processes for the initiative. Bridging the structured business systems and the new enterprise social capabilities through rich and deep integration was the key technical capability. After exploring the capabilities of multiple core business systems, his primary criteria for product assessment focused on the APIs provided to get information in and out of the system. He landed on Socialtext as the best platform to achieve his goals.

    Meanwhile, at Socialtext we’ve remained focused on moving our part of the Social Layer story forward (see an article today in CMSWire). We’ve not only been developing our own features, but we’ve been working with customers in our SocialDev community to help them create the integration they require to run their businesses. The best part of the community is that customers are sharing code and ideas among themselves, without us even having to be involved.

    I know I speak on behalf of the entire Socialtext team in saying that we’re thrilled Jack and his team got the recognition they deserved in this important research note. And we’re looking forward to more social layer stories going forward.

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    Customer Success

    ClimateWorks Foundation Connects Global Network Partners With Enterprise Social Software

    By   |  April 19, 2011, 7:18 pm  |  0 Comments

    The ClimateWorks Foundation supports public policies that help prevent dangerous climate change tied to global warming. With network partners across the world, the foundation supports a global team of organizations and experts within sectors and geographic regions where there is the greatest potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including the United States, China, India, Latin America and Europe.

    With teams focused on transportation, energy efficiency, climate policy, forestry and renewable energy, ClimateWorks needed a central, secure place to harness knowledge and share ideas openly across these sectors. To support this effort, ClimateWorks chose Socialtext’s enterprise social software platform.

    The addition of Socialtext is part of a broader knowledge exchange program occurring at ClimateWorks to support their global mission to achieve substantial carbon abatement by the year 2020. Socialtext will serve as a social intranet and private extranet with partners, where ClimateWorks employees and network organizations can connect with colleagues across the globe and access the relevant information they need to achieve their combined mission.

    Like many Socialtext clients, ClimateWorks decided to give their social intranet a custom name: CWKX (ClimateWorks Knowledge eXchange).

    “CWKX provides the toolkit for optimizing the collaborative creation, capture, organization and sharing of knowledge throughout the entire ClimateWorks Network of partners and affiliates,” says Sarah Nichols, director of knowledge management at ClimateWorks.

    Inside CWKX, every group (whether a strategy team, an external network partner, or internal department) has a workspace where members post the latest scientific and technical research, collaborate on important documentation, discuss strategy proposals, ask for and receive expert advice, post updates, or plan regional and sector summits.

    Previously, Sarah says, most of this collaboration was done via ad-hoc methods. People would email colleagues with updates or documents. “Reply-all” emails would include various changes, and it became very difficult for people to find the experts and information they needed in order to do their best work.

    Now that these interactions are moving into CWKX, “we capture critical institutional knowledge that’s searchable, taggable and easy to find later. Important information doesn’t disappear in an email box or languish on a shared drive. Employees send short messages via Signals, and have deep collaboration inside CWKX workspaces.”

    “At any given moment, we want our network partners to be able to pull together the right colleagues and information they need to tackle the incredibly important challenge the world faces with climate change,” Sarah says. “Our new intranet built on Socialtext helps us deliver on that vision.”

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    Customer SuccessNews & Events

    At New York Event, Customers Share How They Leverage Social Software to Improve Business Performance

    By   |  April 18, 2011, 1:21 pm  |  0 Comments

    In New York on Thursday, we hosted the first of a Socialtext event series that will be taking place all over the country, bringing together Socialtext customers and IT professionals who want to hear the benefits, challenges and experiences of implementing social software.

    Held at the Silverleaf Tavern in midtown Manhattan, our main speaker was Anand Padmanabhan, CIO of NYU Stern. Anand and his team has deployed social software to nearly 10,000 faculty, students, and staff at NYU Stern, fundamentally transforming communication between those constituencies.

    New York Event: Drive superior business performance with social software 

    Anand discussed how NYU Stern approached social software adoption: Combine traditional, informational portal technologies with the easy, social tools inside Socialtext. The result: A vibrant social intranet where work gets done at NYU Stern.

    Michael Idinopulos, our vice president of customer success, also spoke during the event. Michael has coined a phrase that has been very popular in both our customer base and industry followers: Social software in the flow of work. His overall point: If social software exists outside of key business processes and the systems a company has in place, it will be impossible for a company to realize its value. Organizations like NYU Stern, he emphasized, identified key areas and pain points that social software could address, which is why they’ve enjoyed great adoption and value.

    We appreciated everyone who attended the New York event and the great conversations that took place. The Socialtext team is looking forward to our next one in Chicago.

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    Customer SuccessEnterprise 2.0News & Events

    Webinar Recording: See How Two Socialtext Customers Leverage Knowledge with Social Software

    By   |  March 23, 2011, 11:28 pm  |  1 Comment

    Yesterday, Socialtext participated in a KMWorld webinar called “Social Tools for Business: Engage, Optimize, Collaborate.” Alan Lepofsky, our Director of Product Marketing, gave a talk on how social software brings people to the forefront by not only surfacing what content and knowledge is shared across a company, but by which colleagues. He also talked about how social tools enhance key business processes, encourage expertise sharing, and eliminate knowledge silos.

    He highlighted these themes through the lens of two Socialtext customers: GT Nexus, a global supply chain company, and Hayes Knight, an accounting firm in Australia and New Zealand. Below are slides from yesterday’s webinar, along with Alan’s commentary. We hope you enjoy them, and let us know if you have any questions.

    Social Software Is About People and Business Process  

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    Customer SuccessEnterprise 2.0News & Events

    Free KMWorld Webinar Tuesday: Improve Business Performance with Social Software

    By   |  March 17, 2011, 9:08 pm  |  0 Comments

    At Socialtext, we believe that social software implementations are successful when they complement and enhance key business processes a company already has in place. By bringing people to the forefront, social software brings context and awareness to the valuable knowledge and content being shared throughout the enterprise.

    Those will be among the topics covered on Tuesday’s KMWorld Webinar at 2 p.m. Eastern: “Social Tools For Business: Engage, Optimize, Collaborate.” (Click that link to register for free). My colleague, Alan Lepofsky, will discuss how Socialtext customers are utilizing social software to improve business performance and key performance indicators (He will name and cite specific case studies). He’ll also show how one company has deployed an enterprise-wide intranet to leverage organizational knowledge and improve context behind that knowledge.

    The webinar will be moderated by Andy Moore, KMWorld’s publisher, and will also feature content management speakers. It promises to be an interesting mix of perspectives, and we hope to see as many of you there as possible. There will be Q&A session at the end, when you can field questions to Alan and the other speakers.

    A little background on Alan:

    Alan has deep roots in the enterprise collaboration world, having worked at IBM for 14 years before he came to Socialtext in 2008. He works very actively with our customers and product teams, and has been a leader in our Socialtext Connect product offering — which allows people to integrate traditional enterprise systems with our social software platform.

    We hope to see you Tuesday!

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    Customer Success

    Social Software Thrives in South Australian Government

    By   |  November 26, 2010, 11:06 am  |  1 Comment

    I’ve had a great time the past week in Australia, talking with customers and practitioners about how they’re utilizing social software to eliminate information silos, unlock knowledge, and improve their core business processes. One area that’s been particularly amazing to observe down here is the traction we’re seeing in government.

    During the past year, governments of all shapes and sizes have been utilizing enterprise social software to enable their employees to collaborate faster across organizational boundaries to serve constituents more efficiently, giving rise to a trend that’s becoming more widely known as Government 2.0. In the United States, Socialtext was added to the GSA schedule, and we’ve welcomed government customers like the Defense Acquisition University (DAU).

    But we’ve been seeing similar needs in governmental organizations internationally, such as here in Australia, where we’ll be holding a Government 2.0 event on December 2 in Melbourne with a Socialtext customer, the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (DPC) South Australia. DPC is the principal government agency in South Australia. It delivers specialist policy advice and programs in a number of areas including social inclusion, the arts, and sustainability and climate change.

    Adelaide, South Australia

    DPC embraced Socialtext to help its 1,200 employees manage projects online, collaborate across departmental silos, share expertise and improve awareness of their colleagues’ day-to-day activities.

    Martin Jackson, the CIO of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, is spearheading the effort. The impetus: The DPC’s chief executive wanted to see the organization managed more like a business and less like a typical government bureaucracy. With the Premier himself being an active Twitter user, the department is now using Socialtext Signals, our private microblogging tool, to share work, thoughts and ideas with each other in real-time. Because Signals is integrated with deeper collaboration tools like wikis, blogs and social spreadsheets, employees have a range of ways in which they can access and share knowledge.

    Because government regulations often stipulate that data must be stored behind the firewall, DPC uses our secure, on-site SaaS appliance. This gives them the benefits of SaaS, but the security of on-premise software.

    Prior to Socialtext, the process of sharing information at DPC typically took place over e-mail and shared drives, cluttered with documents that had all sorts of different naming conventions. Now, Martin sees a lot of that project management and sharing to happen inside Socialtext, which he says eliminates information silos.

    I’ve really enjoyed spending the time with Martin and his team, and I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with Eugene and the rest of my fellow Socialtexters when I return home. Now I’m off to Sydney, where I’ll be checking in with some more customers and Australian press and analysts.

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    Newer Entries Older Entries

    About This Blog

    Weblog on gaining business results from social software.

    On this blog, Socialtext staffers and customers explore how companies can gain the most business value from their use of enterprise social software, including microblogging, social networking, filtered activity streams, widget-based dashboards, blogs and wikis.

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    Eugene Lee, CEO Ross Mayfield, Co-founder & Chairman Michael Idinopulos, VP of Professional Services Alan Lepofsky, Director of Marketing Luke Closs, Lead Developer

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    Recent Posts

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    Socialtext, Peoplefluent… what’s the big deal?

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    New videos on editing pages, images and more!

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