Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People Advance the State of Business Social Software

Business Wire, April 17, 2008

Business Social Software Leader Offers Four Core Solution Areas for Customer Success

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Socialtext today announced that it has built upon its wiki foundation to launch a broad set of Business Social Software solutions. Two significant product innovations -- Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People -- extend the wiki platform for people to gain additional insight by managing their information, conversations and connections. Socialtext also launched four core Solution Areas: Business Social Networks, Collaborative Intelligence, Flexible Client Collaboration and Participatory Knowledgebase. The business social software launch heralds a new direction for the company, in the works since CEO Eugene Lee took the helm five months ago.

Socialtext's four core Solution Areas have been gleaned from five years of close engagement with enterprise customers and implemented by a Professional Services organization lead by Michael Idinopulos, a former McKinsey VP of Knowledge Management. This solutions orientation is in high demand with an increasing number of organizations looking to transform their business through social software.

"Wikis are the foundation for business social software, and we are building the rest of the house," said CEO Eugene Lee. "It starts with People to make it easier, if not fun, to discover expertise. The Dashboard lets individuals customize their view of information and conversations. When combined with our four core Solution Areas, businesses not only realize productivity gains, but insight from their employees, customers and business partners. What we launched today shows how we will grow and transform our customer's business, now and in the future."

Wikis have emerged as the foundation for Business Social Software because of their flexibility and simplicity as a collaborative platform. Socialtext customers continue to benefit from best practices, templates, features specific to solution areas, training and management consulting to implement these solutions successfully. Forrester Research predicts that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will reach $4.6 billion globally by 2013. According to a recent Forrester Research report: In 2008, firms will look to invest in the most well established Web 2.0 tools -- namely, wikis, blogs, and RSS... We expect that as the year progresses, more firms will start looking at social networking than the number that expects to today. Not only do most implementations begin with a wiki, but as a foundation for social software it orients success in collaborative knowledge sharing.

Socialtext version 3.0 includes:

* Socialtext Dashboard -- personalized and customizable dashboards of internal and external social software activity. The social news feed of your colleague's activity in wikis and beyond aids attention management. Enterprise-class and standards-based widgets, that users can generate, customize and assemble with a simple drag-and-drop user experience for what the individual determines productive. Or, starting with Dashboard Templates for the Four Solution Areas, users, or central administrators, can create and deploy dashboards for groups. Socialtext Dashboard supports third party widgets, and the OpenSocial gadget standard. Socialtext 3.0 also provides significant enhancements to its open APIs for enterprise integration

* Socialtext People -- social networking adapted for the enterprise. Throughout the Socialtext wiki, Profiles are made visible so at any time you can pivot to the people behind the content. Profiles and a user directory make it easy for colleagues to introduce themselves and discover implicit and explicit expertise. People can subscribe to the activity of colleagues. Groupings enable users to declare interest and expertise on their profile and other users profiles, making group forming as simple as adding a tag.

The two new enhancements to Socialtext are currently in Beta and will be commercially available within a quarter. "The founding insight of Socialtext was adapting innovations from the consumer web that have great social dynamics into enterprise solutions," said Chairman, President and Co-founder Ross Mayfield. "We foresaw that wikis would be the foundation, which we are now extending across Business Social Software."

Socialtext's unique core competency is extracting value out of the social patterns within an enterprise context. Socialtext's service model has historically had a high level of engagement with premium customers and practice innovation by Socialtext Professional Services. Solution-specific implementation results faster and greater adoption and customer success. The four core Solution Areas derived from Socialtext's five years in Business Social Software are:

* Collaborative Intelligence for sales and marketing, as implemented for market leaders including Humana and SAP

* Participatory Knowledgebase for service and support, as implemented for market leaders including Symantec and Microstrategy

* Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services, as implemented for market leaders including MWW Group and CoActive Marketing Group