Review: Secure MicroBlogging Appliance

By Ross Mayfield | July 21, 2009, 9:47 am | 0 Comments

Jon Mell of the UK social software consultancy Headshift posted a review of the new Socialtext Microblogging Appliance. If you can’t make tomorrow’s webinar about it, it’s a good summary complete with screenshots from his own deployment.

His post begins:

Since I last blogged about Socialtext Desktop and Signals, the guys have done a lot of work on the new features. So much so, they have released an appliance with just the Desktop, Signals and Profiles features – the Socialtext Microblogging Appliance. The fact that Socialtext, the poster-child wiki company, have now released a product without a wiki shows how far they have come, as well as where they are spending their energy and investment – on social networking features rather than wiki functionality.

Of the three big social networking platforms, Socialtext is the only one with an out of the box desktop client. Whilst Connections and Jive offer the ability to update statuses, Socialtext takes this a lot further and is clearly positioning Signalling as a core feature of the product. The desktop client should make significant waves in the market, given how people’s use of Twitter changes for the better once they use desktop tools such as Twhirl or Tweetdeck. Put simply, it removes the barrier between thinking and contributing – a C-level exec can socialise their thoughts instantly, without having to worry about opening a browser, navigating to a page, logging in etc.

While Jon is right about how far we have come and the difference of having Microblogging and a dynamic Desktop app, I should emphasize that we continue to add functionality and enhance the quality of all of our products with each bimonthly release.

For example, recent wiki enhancements include:

Edit Summaries — that can optionally be posted as a Signal
Templates — create a new page with a template and make any page a template by just adding a tag
Stronger tables — sortable, move row/collumn, make borderless
Edit contention — warns when someone is editing a page with a link to the Profile of that person
Enhanced paste from Word — better handling of formatting, heading, bullets, tables
Enhanced search — Inter-workspace, search preferences

Ongoing improvement of our products isn’t just what Socialtext customers expect, but something we have ingrained in our culture and business model. One of the virtues of SaaS is that it incents the provider to continually serve well while improving to provide further reasons for subscription renewal. Also, the depth of our wiki offering continues to be a differentiator.

But Jon is on to a key aspect of the Socialtext MicroBlogging Appliance, how it lowers the barrier for adoption, even by busy executives. But even before adoption comes IT basics, such as secure onsite deployment — something microblogging pure plays like Yammer don’t deliver.