New Offering from Socialtext Encourages Adoption of Collaboration Networks by Companies; Availability of SocialCalc Announced

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Socialtext, the leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, today announced the availability of Socialtext Free 50, a new free offering aimed at mainstream use for up to 50 people within an organization to collaborate using Socialtext's social software platform. Employees can join or create their own private collaboration networks by using their work email address at Socialtext.com. In addition to the new free offering, the company announced the immediate availability of SocialCalc, the first social spreadsheet program that simplifies version control, reduces errors and increases productivity for distributed teams.

Socialtext Free 50 provides online collaboration with Twitter-style micro-blogging, social networking, personalized dashboards, weblog publishing and a wiki workspace. Built on Adobe(R) AIR(TM) technology, the dynamic desktop application includes "drag-n-drop" file sharing across the enterprise. The organization's IT department can control of the private network's content and participation in Free 50 at no charge, and the free service is governed by IT friendly policies. Socialtext Free 50 also offers the ability to seamlessly upgrade to Socialtext Hosted and secure Onsite Appliance deployment options for the Socialtext Platform.

This announcement comes on the 30-year-anniversary of VisiCalc, the pioneering spreadsheet program by SocialCalc Product Lead Dan Bricklin; VisiCalc's co-creator and author of the newly released book "Bricklin on Technology". Now in public beta, SocialCalc is available to Socialtext Hosted and Appliance customers without charge.

"Many of our customers take a practical approach of workgroup use, before widespread transformative deployments," said Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext. "These new offerings enable more businesses to discover a new way of working without barriers and decide when to engage with us to grow revenue, strengthen customer relationships and adapt to change. Socialtext continues to exercise its Enterprise 2.0 leadership with a 'freemium' SaaS business model, while expanding the power of its social software platform."

Socialtext also expanded capabilities within Socialtext Signals, the Twitter-style micro-blogging application that asks users, "What are you working on?" A new full screen interface, private messages and integrated user experience across the Socialtext Platform increases employee engagement, connections and awareness.

Socialtext will be present at booth #609 at Enterprise 2.0 Boston, June 22 - 25, 2009.

About Socialtext

As the Enterprise 2.0 leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses. Enterprise 2.0 enables the collective intelligence of many, which provides a competitive advantage by increasing innovation, corporate agility, strengthening customer relationships and growing revenue. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 5,000 customers world-wide, including Acumen Fund, BASF, Boston College, Davies Public Affairs, Egon Zehnder, Emergent Solutions, Epitaph Records, The Hospital for Sick Children, IKEA, Intel, MicroStrategy, 'mktg', OSIsoft, SAP, Sungard and Symantec.

People are the Platform. Socialtext Workspace, is the first enterprise wiki and includes robust capabilities such as collaborative weblogs. Socialtext Signals provides private Twitter-style microblogging. Socialtext People enables enterprise social networking. Socialtext Dashboard provides personalized and customizable widget-based interface for people and teams to manage attention. SocialCalc is the social spreadsheet for distributed teams. Socialtext Desktop brings it all together in a dynamic desktop application. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.

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We've teamed up with leading microblogging researchers Laura Fitton and Marcia Conner of Pistachio Consulting to provide Twitterprise: a social messaging seminar series.

Webinar 1: Twitterprise Overview
April 9, 9am PDT

If you're wondering whether talk of "Twitter in the enterprise" is an overblown fad or an opportunity you need to understand now, this webinar is for you.

Webinar 2: Twitterprise Use Cases & Case Studies
April 23, 9am PDT

The second webinar builds upon the first. Join this free webinar to get specifics on how companies are using social messaging and the value it creates for them. We'll explore general use cases of social messaging technology, and a Socialtext customer will present how they are using Socialtext's microsharing technology, Socialtext Signals.

Webinar 3: Twitterprise Adoption & Achievement
May 7, 9am PDT

The third webinar gets practical about how to foster adoption for "Twitter-like" microsharing technologies in the enterprise. In this webinar you will learn how to foster adoption in a way that directs it towards a business goal. We'll share lessons learned for implementing social messaging and for setting business goals for social messaging that deliver results.

Click here to learn more about what you can learn, the background of the presenters and how to register.

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This week I gave a talk at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.  The slides are below, and Holger Nauheimer live-blogged the session.

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Today we announced the immediate availability of Socialtext 3.5, enhancing the leading social software platform for business. This release provides enhancements across all of our products, but primarily provides two new substantial capabilities:

• Socialtext Desktop is outta beta. Our dynamic Adobe AIR(TM) desktop application moves beyond the ability to view and post Signals (a private Twitter for businesses), and Activity Streams that let you discover new people through your content and content through your content. A new People tab lets you search and explore the social networks you build for employees, partners and customers. A new Workspace tab lets you search and browse through content with drag-and-drop sharing of attachments. Download it now to experience what might be the most powerful and productive collaboration desktop application to be delivered for Adobe AIR on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Socialtext Dashboard enhanced for group-use. Socialtext Dashboard is a personalized and customizable homepage for managing your attention across Socialtext and other enterprise and web systems. Socialtext 3.5 provides new capabilities for administrators to add OpenSocial standards-based widgets to the gallery and push them directly to user's Dashboards. Socialtext customers are using this to deliver content, applications to get team members on the same page and enhance the participation in intranets and extranets. Start your own free trial to try it now.

Details of this release and others can be found on the Release Blog in the Customer Exchange.

The capabilities of 3.5 have really changed the way I work. Desktop makes Socialtext more of a real-time experience, where I feel constantly connected with my colleagues and find people and content at my fingertips. We are using Dashboard to roll out widgets from Salesforce.com to our sales team so they manage their attention even more effectively.

If you are a Socialtext customer, I'm interested in how it is changing how you work and please share screenshots of the Dashboards you create on the Customer Exchange.

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Internet Evolution interviewed TransUnion CTO John Parkinson about the ROI of Social Networking. It is relatively early in their use of Socialtext, but they are already achieving significant success.  Here is the sidebar article, quoted in full:

TRANSUNION FINDS COST SAVINGS, SEEKS MORE

Can't put an ROI on social networking? TransUnion CTO John Parkinson has his: an estimated $2.5 million in savings in less than five months while spending about $50,000 on a social networking platform. The savings comes from buying less stuff. TransUnion is one of the big three credit report companies, and it runs on a lot of custom software code. Instead of buying more gear to improve IT performance, employees are brainstorming ideas across larger groups on the company's Socialtext platform. "The savings mostly come out of teams that would have historically said, 'Buy me more hardware' or 'I need a new software tool' or 'I need more processing capacity,' who figured out how to solve their problems without asking for any of those things," says Parkinson.

While the estimated ROI numbers look promising, Parkinson stresses that wasn't why TransUnion got started with social networking. He thought it would meet a need for employees, and, just as importantly, "I wanted to defend against too much of this going on in public," he says.

TransUnion knew it was time to provide an internal social networking tool when people started asking for permission to set up an employee group inside Facebook. So the company did a quick survey. About 2,000 of its 2,700 employees were using some kind of public social networking tool. Since the company deals in credit reports, it wasn't keen on employees gathering to talk shop on the public Web. So the IT team set up Socialtext inside the company firewall. Parkinson liked the features of the online network Ning but decided he needed the software on its own network for security.

The Socialtext platform has profiles, a wiki capability, and instant messaging. Perhaps most powerfully, employees can use it to ask questions of a broad group. People can tune their settings to allow all questions or allow only those from certain groups or people. But all the questions and answers get written to the database. The platform lets people vote on answers they like. It also has tools to analyze which answers people are reading and using to solve problems, and how answers correlate to topics that are most valuable to the company.

Here's where this idea gets even more interesting. TransUnion is studying usage data to learn who's best at solving business problems raised in the social network. With that, it's experimenting with new job descriptions for a couple of them, so that handling these questions within the forum is a formal part of their role.

"It was never very clear to us, looking in, who the authoritative sources were, who was good at solving problems," Parkinson says. "Now we can see a lot of that because we're starting to see patterns emerge, to see who's following whom, who's the good source of questions, who offers good answers. All those things that you sort of know by the grapevine, we now have data for."

TransUnion's Socialtext platform co-exists with Microsoft SharePoint, which has some of the same wiki and networking tools. Parkinson draws the line this way: If an activity is part of a formal process, the collaboration should happen in SharePoint. In bringing on a new customer, for example, many formal steps are involved, and SharePoint has workflow tools that allow for collaboration while making sure the necessary hand-offs happen and the process is completed. "On the other hand, if I want to improve the process of bringing on a customer, I launch a discussion on Socialtext," Parkinson says.

Extrapolating on the company's success so far, he hopes the platform can deliver $5 million to $8 million in total savings this year. The platform only went live in October, and company-wide in January. Will the momentum continue? Will people find uses that are less productive? Parkinson isn't declaring victory yet, but he likes what he's seen.

-- Chris Murphy (cjmurphy@techweb.com)

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You might have seen some of the buzz from today's launch of Socialtext Signals (video) and Socialtext Desktop (video). I really encourage you to try the new Adobe AIR app, a real-time way to use Socialtext.  Here is what the press and blogosphere is saying:

"Each communication and collaboration tool demands a different degree of effort and attention. Writing a Signals entry is a small gesture, so by itself it generates a small amount of value. But put together with everyone else's gestures, you get a collective view of what's going on, which is important for companies that want to execute better," Aparicio said.

Socialtext Brings Status Updates to the Enterprise - Mashable 

Frankly, Socialtext's approach makes a lot more sense than some of what we've seen so far in the "Twitter for business" market. By connecting status updates with a broader suite of business applications and activity streams, it would seem to make connecting the right people and information easier, versus needing to use yet another application. Of course, it also means you need to implement Socialtext within your organization, which is a decision that will be based on a lot more than just its microblogging features.

Socialtext Adds Twitter-like "Signals" And a Desktop AIR App - TechCrunch

In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.

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What customers are saying about Socialtext Signals, in 140 characters or less:

Signals is zeitgeist for your company without the angst for IT. Want better execution? Simply improve awareness of what is already going on.
Sam Apracio, Chief Technology Officer, Angel.com

Signals allows students to blast a digital nugget of importance to the class. It's a digital espresso shot that makes us all smarter.
John Gallaugher, Associate Professor of Information Systems, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

I've been predicting the convergence of Wikis, Twitter, blogs and Facebook. Socialtext Signals just made it a reality.
Montgomery Flinsch Electronic Publishing & Media Technology Services, Mayo Clinic

Signals has awesome potential to help us sell more. We are using it with our sales and marketing teams to sense and respond to new opportunities.
Valerie Jenkins, Director Marketing & Communications, Serious Materials

Signals lets us spread great ideas like wildfire and extinguish bad ones rapidly. That's value for our clients and our firm.
Lisa Palmer, Sr. Vice President at Davies Public Affairs

Status and page updates help our global staff and community feel connected real-time; almost as if working in a single office.
Claudia Miro, Director, Client Services, Emergent Solutions

E-mail is linear but our business is dynamic. The beauty of Signals is brevity, speed, and instant collaboration
Vice President and Co-founder, Voce Communications

SocialText is my preferred dashboard for projects that transcend the firewall & with the addition of Signals, upgrades us to Enterprise 2.1
Chris Heuer, Creative Social Media Strategist & Coach, AdHocnium

What do you have to say about Signals?  Tweet it and we will add the best contributions here.

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Twitter-style Application Expands Socialtext's Enterprise Collaboration Platform with Secure Social Messaging Application -- Socialtext Desktop Public Beta, Powered By Adobe AIR

Palo Alto, CA - March 3, 2009 - Socialtext, the leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 Solutions, today announced general availability of Socialtext Signals™, the Twitter-style social messaging interface for the Socialtext platform. Socialtext Signals provides customers simple and efficient information sharing capabilities, and further expands the company's enterprise social networking and collaboration platform. Socialtext also announced the public beta availability of the Socialtext Desktop, a rich desktop application powered by Adobe® AIR®, for monitoring and participating in social networking, collaboration and social messaging.

Here's what customers are saying about Socialtext Signals, in 140 characters or less:

• "I've been predicting the convergence of Wikis, Twitter, blogs and Facebook. Socialtext Signals just made it a reality," says Montgomery Flinsch, Electronic Publishing & Media Technology Services, Mayo Clinic.
• "Signals allows students to blast a digital nugget of importance to the class. It's a digital espresso shot that makes us all smarter," said John Gallaugher, Associate Professor of Information Systems, Carroll School of Management, Boston College.
• "Signals let's us spread great ideas like wildfire and extinguish bad ones rapidly. That's value for our clients and our firm," said Lisa Palmer, Sr. Vice President at Davies Public Affairs

The official release of Socialtext Signals introduces the same micro-blogging style of open sharing that today's popular public tools offer, but keeps the conversations secure within the framework of the organization. Unlike standalone "Twitter-clones," Socialtext Signals™ provides an integrated user experience for social messaging across the Socialtext platform, such as the ability to Signal in context of wiki editing. Socialtext Signals™ amplifies, clarifies and complements other collaboration activities, eliminating the need for playing "email volleyball" with attachments and allowing coworkers to transparently work and collaborate on common goals.

Socialtext Desktop is built using Adobe AIR technology, a cross-platform runtime and key component of the Adobe Flash Platform. Within Socialtext Desktop, Adobe AIR enables a persistent, rich interface for automatic notification of Signals (what people are saying and sharing) and Updates (automatically generated notifications about what people are working in: wiki edits, blog posts, comments, profile edits), with the ability to post at your fingertips. Socialtext users can download the public beta of Socialtext Desktop at http://socialtext.com/products/desktop.php. For more information about Adobe AIR, visit www.adobe.com/go/air.

"The rich experience that Adobe AIR provides for Web applications outside of the browser is a perfect match with Socialtext's unique flexible SaaS-hosted and SaaS-appliance delivery," said Bryant Macy, director of product marketing for the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. "Socialtext Desktop is a great example of how Adobe Flash Platform technologies can be used to create intuitive, highly interactive business-critical Web applications that improve productivity in the enterprise."

"As the enterprise landscape transforms to incorporate social media tools, many customers told us of their need to integrate a micro-blogging function into their existing collaboration platform," said Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext. "Signals creates a new workplace environment that amplifies and complements other collaboration activity, allowing individuals to transparently work and collaborate on common goals through a secure social messaging application within the organization."

About Socialtext
As the Enterprise 2.0 leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses. Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating tighter connections between employees, partners, and customers. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 4,000 customers world-wide, including BASF, Boston College, CondeNet, Epitaph Records, IKEA, Intel, MicroStrategy, MWW Group, Nokia, SAP, Sunguard, Symantec, and USA Today.

Socialtext's flagship product, Socialtext Workspace, is the first enterprise wiki and the foundation of the connected collaboration platform. Socialtext People enables enterprise social networking. Socialtext Dashboard provides personalized and customizable widget-based interface for people and teams to manage attention. SocialCalc is the social spreadsheet for distributed teams. These products deliver connected collaboration with context. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.

Media Contacts:
Voce Communications
Gina von Esmarch
(415) 203 4660
gvon@vocecomm.com

Yasemin Krause
(415) 848 2579
ykrause@vocecomm.com

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I had a modern version of a fireside chat with Stowe Boyd this week, part of his Open Enterprise 2009 research:

Ross Mayfield on Open Enterprise 2009 from stowe boyd on Vimeo.

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Robert Scoble stopped by yesterday to chat about the economy and social software with myself and CEO Eugene Lee.  He just posted a blog entry and three videos:

Part I. What will happen to both large and small companies during downturn? What are they seeing from their enterprise customers? (Hint: record sales so far this quarter but great uncertainty for next year).
Part II. Discussion of corporate pain of email.
Part III. Ross tells me about socialtext’s alumni network and how that can help both companies and workers who are laid off.

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