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Integration

Socialtext Connect lets you surface critical events from enterprise applications and inject them into the Socialtext collaboration platform, where employees from across your organization collaborate and take action. People can see those events in the Socialtext application streams they monitor and, where authorized, send updates to the enterprise systems from Socialtext.

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The New Social Layer

Until now, critical information, events and processes have been locked in enterprise applications and only accessible to the people who use the particular application. By integrating enterprise applications with our social software, the Socialtext collaboration platform now creates an important new technology layer in the enterprise architecture – the social layer – which spans departments, geographies and systems.

Socialtext Connect works with both on-premise and cloud-based enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP and document management systems.

Standards-based

It also integrates with and leverages the fast innovation taking place in web-based consumer applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. Socialtext Connect adheres to established and emerging web standards, including Twitter Annotations and Google OpenSocial. Socialtext also plans to support the activitystrea.ms standard.

Three core components of Socialtext Connect

  • Connectors. A Connector serves as a bridge between an enterprise application and Socialtext. Connectors use Socialtext's ReST API, and can be built to connect any application to Socialtext. Connectors can be built by IT developers, system integrators, and third-party developers. Socialtext has a pre-built Connector to Microsoft SharePoint.

    • A Connector can be hosted in the cloud, as a plug-in to Socialtext's hosted service or appliance, or on the enterprise application itself.

  • Signals Annotations. A Signals microblogging message can be enhanced with a rich presentation of metadata from the enterprise system, such as a chart, image, graph or video. These Signals Annotations enrich the value of application streams. Signals Annotations are built to the emerging Twitter Annotations standard, and will evolve with that standard.
  • App Bots. An App Bot is a bi-directional software agent that listens for specialized events or information from an enterprise system, a web application or Socialtext, and writes to these applications.

App Bots can be built with different levels of sophistication, including:

  • App Bot that provides a simple alert. For example, when the sales forecast is changed downward by a specified % in Salesforce.com, an App Bot posts a short message to a specified group microblogging channel in Socialtext. Or when a document is changed in the Sales Tools library in Microsoft SharePoint, an App Bot posts a short message on the Sales Group microblogging channel in Socialtext.
  • App Bot with a mashup of rich media from multiple sources. For example, when inventory falls below a certain threshold in an ERP system, an App Bot posts a short message, along with an associated Annotation with a map that overlays from the ERP system the locations of the nearest depots that have unallocated stock of the missing item, along with the stock level.
  • App Bot that is interactive. For example, an App Bot that monitors Twitter for messages from a particular customer, posts a short message alerting Socialtext subscribers to that Tweet, and allows the user to post a message back to Twitter.