Social Networking

With Socialtext People, you get social networking deeply integrated with enterprise collaboration. Socialtext People connects work colleagues and gives them a full picture of each other. It gives them the context of the who, what, when, where and why of the people they are working with, building the level of trust they have in each other, and increasing teamwork and work quality. With Socialtext People, everyone is aware of what is going on in the organization – the conversations underway, the thinking in progress, the groups that have formed, who knows what, who is working on what.

Why is it we often know our online colleagues better than the people we work with every day? Why is it that social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook can be more effective than your own HR system for internal job transfers? Why is it easier to find someone we went to school with than someone with a particular area of expertise in your own company? Why is it the bulk of work doesn’t leverage the specialized knowledge that exists right there in your own company? These are the questions Socialtext People addresses.

Get a rich picture of the people behind the work

The way work gets done is by people working with people, “bouncing ideas” off each other, tapping into each other’s expertise, leveraging each other’s knowledge and insights, re-purposing each other’s output. Socialtext People helps employees get to know each other with rich profiles that include photos, background, experience, expertise, interests, links, stories, and in-the-flow-of-work updates. They reveal what the person has been working on, and also show the workspaces in common between you and the person.

Track people who are helpful to you

You can “follow” people and get an update stream of their activity. These “automatic breadcrumbs” keep you apprised of the topics and pages others take part in. You can read the comments they write, from a widget on your dashboard or from Socialtext Desktop, without having to go to the individual page. If you want to learn more, simply click on the update to get directly to the page.

Discover who else can be helpful

A great deal of the value of social networking comes from connections with the people not directly involved together on a formal project. These people can often bring in new perspectives and ideas and can unleash innovation. Socialtext People gives you a variety of quick and easy ways to discover new connections. With everyone working openly, you discover people as you see their work (with appropriate privacy controls built in). You can pivot directly from any contribution to the contributor’s profile to learn about the person. You can browse a collection of tags and get a big picture of the makeup of the community and ideas for new connections. In the profile you'll see who she's following and who is following her, which gives you another way to discover new connections.

Stay up to date with your social network, automatically

Socialtext People lets you create social networks that can include work colleagues, partners and customers. Using profile tags – both the tags a person gave him/herself and tags others gave him or her – you can find others by what you have in common. You can create a shared workspace or blog for the group to keep in touch. Ad-hoc groups often begin conversations that turn into significant value for the company.

Since updates flow automatically as everyone does their work, you stay up to date automatically with your social networks, and they stay up to date with you. Everyone keeps the network informed of what they’re up to simply as a byproduct of doing their work.

Tap your social network to get things done

When you need specialized knowledge to inform a decision or project, you can search tags to locate someone with the exact expertise you need. Often there is someone with just the specialized knowledge you need, sometimes right down the hall.

Make your corporate directory social

Information from Active Directory or an LDAP directory can be automatically populated into Socialtext People. Profiles on Socialtext People are richly contextual, showing not only the standard corporate data such as reporting structure and contact information, but also information about the person such as the people they are following, the workspaces they have in common with you, their profile page on external social networks, their recent activity and more.