Coverage & Awards

SOPA: Dead but Not Forgotten

TMCNet, January 26, 2012

If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past couple of months, then you’ve no doubt heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill, also known as House Bill 3261 or H.R. 3261, which was introduced in the House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. SOPA called for a crackdown on copyright infringement by restricting access to sites that host or facilitate the trading of pirated content.

SOPA, which was recently killed by sponsor and House Representative Lamar Smith, would have represented a fundamental change in the way the Internet works today and would have undermined all Software as a Service (SaaS)/cloud companies. If the bill had passed, it could have been a sign that additional countries could follow suit with their own legislation which would inevitably hurt businesses operating internationally and their ability to provide services in other countries.

SOPA and PIPA: Let's Pause and Write Rational Piracy Legislation

New Tech Observer, January 24, 2012

Both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Representative Lamar Smith (R-Tex) have decided to postpone further action on the piracy bills that have led to some of the biggest protests in web history. With President Obama and FCC Chairman Genachowski both agreeing that some response to piracy is necessary, the fight against the first iteration of SOPA may be over, but the task of negotiating rational legislation is just getting started.

We have seen generalizations about how piracy legislation would negatively affect American business and innovation, but there has been very little time to develop a better understanding of what these negative impacts might be. With this in mind, I had a chance to sit down with Eugene Lee, the CEO of SocialText, a social networking service provider for corporations that operates on the software as a service model, to talk about how SOPA, PIPA, and future piracy legislation might have impacted both his business and the SAaS industry as a whole.

Inside Motley Fool's Enterprise Social Network

InformationWeek, January 9, 2012

Prior to the selection of Socialtext, some employees had started using Yammer for social collaboration. Bishop said his team decided Socialtext offered the same kind of microblogging capabilities as Yammer, but could also take over managing corporate content that had been stored in the wiki or in SharePoint. Socialtext got its start as an enterprise wiki software company and has layered on social networking features. The current version of the product is Socialtext 5.0, which includes the Socialtext 360 feature for matching contacts based on interests or specialties.

Bishop said he found Socialtext easy to customize for a "very Motley Foolish" look that encourages employees to claim it for their own. The company's developers have even added custom widgets to the site, taking advantage of an API based on Google Gadgets and OpenSocial. The home page features a place for the latest video produced for internal consumption, often featuring one of the company's latest premium services or ideas about how to improve service to readers and customers.

5 Questions: Silicon Valley CEO on Leadership

Stark Insider, December 29, 2011

Welcome to another Stark Insider 5 Questions. Today’s topic is one of our favorites: Leadership. We caught up with Eugene Lee, CEO of SocialText and friend of Team Stark to bring you the inside scoop on leadership lessons learned from musical ensembles.

Eugene recently returned from TEDx American Riviera where he presented on this very subject.

How Blue Man Group stayed mum on stage but got social at work

ITBusiness.ca, December 21, 2011

Six months ago, Blue Man Group had successfully performed before 17 million people around the world over two decades – but still couldn't find a way for its own 500 staff to share ideas effectively.

That's where social intranet came in.

The group, founded in New York in 1987 and touring the globe almost non-stop since then, called on Socialtext Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. to deploy a social intranet for its company-wide communications.

Pulse Network Interview with Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee

CIO Insight, September 21, 2011

Socialtext is that software that is used for businesses that are having problems with social media.Butch Stearns and Eric Lundquist talk with CEO of Socialtext, Eugene Lee, about how companies can take advantage of social software.

The Enterprise Social Market Enters Teen Years

Forbes, September 13, 2011

Socialtext, a long-time thought leader in enterprise social continues to be a leader in bringing new social capabilities to business, particularly in the mid-market.

Gartner's Companies to Watch in Social Software for the Workplace Include Telligent, Salesforce.com, Drupal

CMSWire, September 6, 2011

According to Gartner, Socialtext was one of the first vendors to position its product as a "social layer." As a seasoned soution, Socialtext offers a broad range of capabilities which include social spreadsheets, open social support and faceted search. Preintegration with SharePoint and salesforce.com, as well as a desktop client for rich activity feeds and file integration, make it a popular choice for some of the larger organizations out there.

Tapping the Full Power of Social Software as a Strategic Tool

Financial Times, August 23, 2011

A Working Vendor Landscape for Social Business

Enterprise Irregulars, August 15, 2011

How American Hospital Association Combined Social, Single Sign-On

Information Week, June 23, 2011

The AHA system uses the enterprise social network from Socialtext... Chakkarapani said the architecture is hybrid cloud, incorporating pure cloud services like Box, but with Socialtext installed inside the firewall as an appliance for better, more secure integration with Active Directory and other internal resources.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Touts Social, Product Announcements

CIO Magazine, June 22, 2011

Socialtext, a social software company, introduced Socialtasks, a management tool that lets teams visualize and manage tasks in a collaborative work environment. Socialtasks, the company says, consists of three main features.

The first is a page tracker, which allows you to record tasks with various statuses such as new, in progress or complete. Next is the "Page Watcher Bot," a function that monitors Socialtext workspace pages for changes in the task status, and then posts a message for the group working on the task or the manager of the team. Lastly, the new Form Builder lets users create a new wiki page that provides choices for status, priority, owner and more.

Socialtext Launches Integrated Project Management Tools

ReadWriteWeb, June 20, 2011

Socialtext today announced three enhancements to its microblogging and enterprise social networking platform to help visualize and maintain workflows.

Socialtext: Social is Layer, Not a Feature

CMSWire, April 20, 2011

Signals is probably what the social software vendor is best known for today. It's a microblogging app and an activity stream all in one. And it's where the concept of the social layer is clearly demonstrated.

As Lepofsky explains, social is not just a feature that you tack on to your business systems, rather it's functionality that needs to be integrated into the underlying processes, making it a natural extension of how you work.

Socialtext Launches Virtual Appliance for VMware

ReadWriteWeb, April 13, 2011

Socialtext announced today that it will release a virtual appliance that can be deployed as part of an on-premise or in the public cloud using VMware. The virtual appliance will provide all the features of the Socialtext software-as-a-service and its managed appliance.

Socialtext adds virtual appliance

Fierce Content Management, April 13, 2011

Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee says this product makes it much simpler for IT pros to install Socialtext as part of a virtualized private cloud environment.

"As a SaaS company, we want to make it easy for our customers to run our software securely, whether that's in our cloud or securely behind the firewall in their private cloud. This new offering provides yet another option for our customers who have made a commitment to VMware inside their company," Lee said.

This move is consistent with their recent strategy to provide tools that make Socialtext the IT-friendly Enterprise 2.0 tool of choice. Unlike other companies that are trying to win the hearts and minds of end users first, Socialtext has made a concerted effort to create tools and functionality that make it friendly for IT pros.

Not Your Father's Intranet

MIT Technology Review, March 18, 2011

Rather than being made up of random posts about what someone ate or read, most Socialtext entries are created automatically as a result of collaboration with other people. These "in the flow of work" updates happen whenever someone does something productive in Socialtext that others in the company should know about—comments on a blog post, responds to a question, edits a wiki page, or tags a profile. The idea is that people demonstrate their value to the company not by what they say about themselves but by what they do.

Already, Socialtext customers like Getty Images and the American Hospital Association (AHA) have replaced their intranet home pages with Socialtext. Before the AHA implemented Socialtext, employees found it hard to collaborate with each other on issues of health-care reform, says Karthikeyan Chakkarapani, director of technology solutions and operations. "With Socialtext, we were able to integrate it into our other enterprise applications and build a one-stop platform that people can easily access."

Information sharing — New options emerge

KM World, March 1, 2011

Much of the information that GT Nexus wanted to share was available in the company, but was stored on various hard drives and within e-mail messages. The goal was to find a simple, cost-effective method of sharing information. Atherton launched a knowledge management initiative that reflected the vision he had for the enterprise program and provided a clear requirements statement. “We went through a formal RFP process, talked to analysts and developed a short list,” he explains. “Our conclusion was that Socialtext provided the best solution for our needs.”

Socialtext’s platform includes online workspaces, wikis, blogs and microblogging. “We wanted an easy way to collaborate, store documents and also to send Twitter-style messages to provide a quick blast of information companywide when needed,” says Atherton. GT Nexus constructed a social intranet called the Grid, which is organized departmentally. Content relevant to sales, HR and other departments is stored and accessed on the Grid.

GT Nexus has successfully integrated Socialtext with other applications, including a cloud-based software product that tracks software bugs, and Salesforce.com. “The microblogging tool, Socialtext’s Signals, is used to alert colleagues to progress on sales deals or other time-sensitive events,” Atherton points out. “We also have a central location for our technical documentation.”

Making the Intranet a Hub of Enterprise Social Activity

IT Business Edge , March 1, 2011

When I interviewed Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee last month, he told me some of his company's customers were seeing real value from making their intranets the hubs of social activity. A hub is sorely needed. As I wrote in my post "Internal Silos Can Suck Life out of Social Initiatives," organizations won't derive much value from social information if it ends up in the same old departmental silos.

Lee offers several snapshots of Socialtext clients that have added social features to their intranets, including Getty Images, The Motley Fool, Fona International and GT Nexus. The webinar wraps with two folks from the AHA, CIO Jack Mackay and IT Manager Karthik Chakkarapani. The AHA's intranet serves as a centralized hub for information management, aggregation and delivery. It combines features of the "new" intranet like social tools, and integration to software-as-a-service applications using single sign-on with more traditional intranet features such as news updates and a calendar.

Socialtext 4.6 Leverages Google Analytics, IBM Lotus Sametime

eWeek, February 24, 2011

Socialtext launched its annual refresh of its software platform, this time adding instant messaging support for IBM and Microsoft programs, as well as business analytics from Google.

While many enterprise software makers of late are preaching cloud-only software approaches, Socialtext offers a Web-based solution and an on-premises software appliance that sits behind the customer's firewall.

Socialtext software allows business users to collaborate via modern communication tools, including private and shared workspaces, chat and status updates. Employees at Getty Images, Symantec and more than 6,000 other businesses use these tools to share information with their colleagues.

Socialtext Brings Social Networking to Corporate Intranets

InternetNews, February 24, 2011

"Mixer, our social intranet built on Socialtext, has been adopted by 95 percent of our organization," Jennifer Fox, director of learning and development at Getty Images, said in a statement. "How do you put a price on an employee coming in and knowing they can find the information they need, know it's relevant, and be more efficient at their job?"

Successful Cloud Implementations

Baseline, January 28, 2011

Skill sets played a big role at Emergent Solutions, a consultancy based in Royal Oaks, Calif. It moved from a SharePoint solution to a Socialtext cloud-based application for handling discussions and project management for its 60 contractors located around the globe.

“We had learning issues with people who didn’t use SharePoint and found that Socialtext worked better for us,” says Christine Cavanaugh-Simmons, the company’s co-founder. “We also were able to get rid of all our servers, and we now have everything backed up with Mozy on its cloud service.”

As a result, Emergent’s contractors are a lot more productive. “People in different countries and continents are all working asynchronously, creating agendas, materials and presentations for our customers,” she says. “There’s no waiting for a weekly meeting or status update. People can engage each other in open conversations, provide feedback and feel part of the team.”

Socialtext goes after unmanaged Yammer users

ZDNet, January 6, 2011

Socialtext has announced a program that will allow Yammer users to migrate to its offerings while saving money.

Socialtext argues that a suite of collaborative social tools will always win against stand alone solutions. I agree. It has always been a major weakness of microblogging platforms that they are essentially a feature set within a much more important category. Therefore any company selling on the premise that microblogging for the enterprise can win is on to a loser.

I view Socialtext as a comprehensive, enterprise class collaboration suite while I tend to think of Yammer as a microblogging tool that has add ons.

Subtext of Socialtext Migration Offer: Yammer Not Enterprise Ready

IT Business Edge, January 6, 2011

Social software companies selling to enterprises "need to make products users love but IT loves as well," said Lee. Socialtext's early entry into the social software market in 2002 (with a wiki product) has given it ample experience in working with both business users and IT organizations, he said. That experience informs how it markets, sells and supports its products.

Socialtext sees its broader suite of functionality (social directories, wiki workspaces, customizable dashboards), added security options (notably a software-as-a-service appliance that can be deployed behind corporate firewalls) and the ability to integrate Socialtext software with enterprise applications as key selling points for enterprises. Socialtext offers a "richer, broader growth path from microblogging," Lee said. While microblogging is a great starting point for social software because of its ease of use, the "real value comes from integrating it with enterprise software systems."