Socialtext

I'm really pleased to be able to welcome Julie to Socialtext's board of directors.  All the usual details are in the press release at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/05-15-2008/0004814208&EDATE= but there's a lot more to this than what you can fit into a news release.

Julie and I have been swimming in parallel lanes of the same swimming pools for, it seems, our entire careers.  We've both been through the email, collaboration software, and enterprise business models routines, and we both still share a passion for how tremendous customer value and businesses can be built by enabling companies to harness their greatest assets - their people.

We reconnected after I joined Socialtext and I was struck by her breadth of experience, the wisdom and learnings she's gleaned through several different career moves, and the depth of her thinking and pattern-matching that is so important to real-world problem solving.  She's already added significant value through her insights, recommendations, and most importantly her probing "have you thought about..." questions that help us as a team stay on our toes.

I also wanted to state that I had explictly wanted to add a woman to our board - not for PR reasons - but rather because I believe that diversity benefits decision-making.  I've always believed that it's the best idea that should win, and that the best ideas usually emerge from a diverse range of inputs, models, experiences, and perspectives.  We're proud to be able to add someone like Julie to our team.

Julie was honored last week as the Alumni of the Year at her alma mater, and she was the distinguished speaker at the U of Alabama commencement.  Apparently she rocked the house down!

Welcome to the Socialtext team Julie!

Yesterday I gave a keynote at Van Web 2.0 naar Enterprise 2.0 in the Netherlands.  My slides are here:

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Tonight our London office is co-hosting a social software dinner with Headshift.  If you are there, I hope you can join us.

Website redesigns are always a lot of work, but in this case we had a lot more moving parts than usual.  We upgraded our underlying content management system, integrated our trial signup process with our new salesforce.com implementation, and transitioned over to a new blogging platform.

 

We are trying to apply our core agile engineering principles to our website work as well - in other words we are now in position to update and respond to suggestions and feedback on a more iterative basis - so we welcome your feedback.

 

Our recent new product launches (Socialtext 3.0, Socialtext People, Socialtext Dashboard) have been received enthusiastically, and our 4 Solutions are now now front and center on our web presence.  We'll be talking more about these more frequently, especially now that we've upgraded all of our machinery.

 

Feedback and suggestions on the new web site layout welcomed.