If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably noticed significant changes over the last few months: Lots of fresh new faces, energy, content, and announcements.

This week, we made a particularly visible change: We introduced a free 30-day trial of Socialtext. Sign up directly from the website, and you’ll be up and running in just a couple minutes.

We’re tremendously excited about the trial–not only because it’s already bringing in more customers, but also because of what it reveals about our underlying philosophy.

Going back to its founding as the first enterprise social software company, Socialtext has always had the most ambitious agenda you can have: We wanted to change the world. (That may sound hokey, but if you can’t have hokey aspirations in Silicon Valley, where can you?). We have consistently aspired to integrate social so deeply into the flow of work that we would make professional life more interesting, social, rewarding, and productive for every employee, every day.

The boldness of that vision led us to create a powerful and flexible product. Whereas most enterprise social vendors focus on point solutions to “sprinkle some social” on the enterprise, Socialtext has embraced a comprehensive product vision: Social intranet, collaborative workspaces, groups, enterprise profiles, social networking, microblogging, spreadsheets, etc.

The result is an unbelievably powerful and versatile tool.

But as Uncle Ben says in Spider Man: With great power comes great responsibility.

Having built a powerful product, we have a responsibility to make that product easy to use. So easy, for example, that a new user could be up, running, and productive in just a minute or two.

The trial is a forcing mechanism. It forced us to launch an experience which is not only powerful, but also engages a Socialtext newbie–whether they’re a new trial user, a new customer, or a new hire in a company that’s been using Socialtext for years. And it’s not a one-and-done kind of thing. We’re an agile shop and we are constantly enhancing the Socialtext product to make it even more powerful. The trial evolves with the product.

Over the next weeks and months you’ll be seeing more major product announcements from us. The trial will continue to be our litmus test. As we make the product even more powerful, we will make the trial experience even simpler.

I hope you’re as excited as we are.

And oh yeah…you should try it.

Photo Credit: Joost Nelissen (cc)

This past weekend Socialtext 4.7.3 was made available to all our customers.  It introduces several new features that will help you share, discover and manage content like never before.

I Like That!

A new “Like” button has been added to Socialtext workspace pages, enabling people to indicate to their colleagues which content they like the most. Hovering your mouse over the Like button displays a list of the people that have liked the page. The new Like features are also available via workspace views and search results, both of which can be sorted so that the most liked pages are displayed at the top of the list.

Flexible Project Management

The new Page Tracker widget provides a graphical way to display links to Socialtext workspace pages. The widget uses columns to organize pages based on a series of tags. There are a variety of uses for the Page Tracker widget, including project management, workflow processes such as accounts payable, organizing marketing material and more. The image below provides an example of how the widget can be used for task management, where the columns display links to pages representing tasks in their various stages and priorities. The Page Tracker widget can be embedded into a wiki page, Group home page or Socialtext Dashboard.

Additional Socialtext 4.7.3 Screenshots showcasing Page-Likes and the Page Tracker widget are available on the web.

What Time Is It?

Prior to this release, you had to define the timezone in each workspace you belong to. Now there is a single global setting that covers all your workspaces, plus all time formats now include the year. From inside any workspace, click settings at the top right, then on the left click My Workspaces, then Preferences-Time.

I know you’re going to enjoy using these new features along with the other improvements this release provides.

With our first release of 2011, Socialtext now allows people to define a preferred name, navigate from cell to cell in tables, more easily insert web content on wiki pages and much more!

Set Your Preferred Name

If you would like to use a nickname like Bob for Robert or Jim for James, or to use a hyphenated last name such as Zeta-Jones, you can now set this preferred name in your Socialtext profile. Your new name will be displayed in all places names appear, such as the People Directory, in signals and on workspace pages. This feature is enabled by default and can be turned off in any account by your Socialtext administrator.

Easy Add Web Content To Pages

You can embed many types of web-based objects such as maps, slides, videos and photos albums on Socialtext workspace pages. Previously this required a little bit of advanced formatting, but now we make it simple via the new Insert HTML feature. First copy the object’s embed code from its web page. Next edit the Socialtext workspace page, click on Insert from the editor toolbar and select HTML. Finally paste the code you copied into the dialog box. When you save the page the object will be displayed. Similarly, you can also insert pre-formatted text and unformatted text using the Insert menu.

Reduce Duplicate Groups

Groups are a great way to interact with people around similar projects or interests, so the last thing you want is to have multiple groups of people collaborating on the same topic. To help eliminate this problem, you can now search group names and descriptions right from the group creation dialog box, reducing the chance of someone creating a new group if a similar one already exists.

Additional Improvements

Based on customer feedback, the following features have been enhanced:

• You can now filter the Socialtext Signals stream to show just the messages that you have sent, those that mentioned your name or those sent privately to you. Using the “Showing Signals From” dropdown menu at the top of the stream, choose “My Conversations”.



• When you are editing a table within a workspace page, you can now use the tab key (or shift + tab) to move forward (or backwards) between cells. You can also use the arrow keys to move left, right, up or down between cells.
• The Socialtext Search bar allows you to choose what type of content to search for: Pages, People, Groups, or Signals. Now the search selection is sticky, meaning the content type you choose will remain until you change it.
• When you click on a link from the Socialtext Dashboard (ex: a person’s profile or a page link) it will now open in the same window instead of opening an additional browser window or tab. If you prefer the old behavior, most web-browsers provide a right-click menu option to open links in a new window, or allow you to press the shift key while you are clicking on the link.

I hope you enjoy these new features and enhancements. As always, we look forward to your feedback.