Why Socialtext Rises Above

Jon Mell, social computing consultant at Headshift, recently wrote a review of Enterprise 2.0 software. Jon begins with “The three leaders in this space are Jive Clearspace, Lotus Connections and Socialtext.” Thank you Jon, we’re proud to be one of the industry’s leaders.

The article provides a review of each platform’s strengths, explaining that Jive’s legacy is in forum software, IBM’s is in profiles, and Socialtext’s background is wiki technology.

I’d like to provide more information on some of the key strengths of Socialtext that Jon mentions.

“Socialtext is unmatched in its ability to collaborate on documents due to its wiki background”

While there are several important aspects of building your business oriented social network, at the end of the day what matters most is the content you create and share with each other. That is why Socailtext’s unmatched experience in building wikis provides our customers the best solution for their collaboration needs. Other vendors may talk about what their product could possibly do in future versions, Socialtext delivers what customers need today.

“Socialtext has the strongest status/Twitter/micro-blogging offering”

As mentioned above, creating content is what collaboration is all about. But if people don’t know about new pages, updates, and comments, what good are they? That is where Socialtext’s ability to inform your colleagues of changes, and for you to discover new and useful items and people is so powerful.

“Socialtext has the quickest release cycle of all three”

Often the difference between success and failure is the ability to react quickly. To collaborate faster. Make decisions faster. Change faster. By providing our customers with frequent updates, Socialtext ensures they don’t have to wait months, or even years for new features. Our customers have no servers to install, configure, nor manage. There are no patches to apply. No service packs to download. No code to manually unpack and install. Instead, Socialtext customers can focus on what they know best, running their business, while we take care of the administration of their collaboration and social networking platform.

“Socialtext also includes a powerful REST API”

No two customers have the exact same environment, nor the same integration needs. The Socialtext API makes it easy for customers to integrate information from other systems into Socialtext, and to integrate Socialtext with the other products they use. Socialtext Dashboard also supports the OpenSocial standard, enabling thousands of available Google Gadgets to be easily integrated.

Finally, while features are important, choosing a vendor involves more than just comparing features x/y/z. There are literally dozens of vendors that consider themselves in the “Enterprise 2.0″ space. However, customers must include factors such as dealing with someone:

• Who understands their business requirements
• Who is experienced in implementation and adoption
• That has a reputation for leadership and innovation
• Someone they both respect and trust

At the end of the day, only a few companies can meet these important criteria. So while it is wonderful that our product speaks for itself, often our customers cite these things as the reason they choose Socialtext to help them run their business.

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