Socialcast: Collaboration Beyond the Enterprise

Today the enterprise collaboration solutions provider Socialcast (a VMWare company), announced a set of new features to augment and extend the capability in their already impressive collaboration solution. For readers that might not be familiar with Socialcast's solution, it primarily serves as an internal enterprise activity and interest stream, where colleagues can share status updates, links to relevant content, share files, and easily create internal groups organized along organizational or project lines. More recently, Socialcast launched a product called Reach, which gives customers the ability to easily embed and include the core collaboration platform in any number of enterprise systems like ERP, CRM, or other knowledge management platforms, thus taking 'collaboration' closer to the places and systems where the work gets done.

Today's announcement of the new capability that allows enterprises to dynamically create external collaboration groups, and that extends the collaboration platform to an organizations' partners, customers, or even social media fans and followers; is a natural extension of the Reach tool, taking the collaboration environment beyond the walled garden of the internal enterprise, to wherever and with whomever leveraging the platform makes sense.

External Group View - image provided by Socialcast

Beginning today, users of Socialcast can create dynamic groups to invite contractors or suppliers to collaborate on projects, connect more effectively with joint venture partners, or even conduct on the fly customer and follower focus group discussions by simply sharing a link to an external group on Facebook or Twitter, and invite followers to participate. It is a great piece of functionality, and one that attempts to begin to address the more flexible and fluid ways that organizations, teams, and individuals are getting work accomplished today.  

The other interesting feature that Socialcast announced today is a new organizational charting feature that not only can graphically depict the traditional organizational relationships and hierarchy (automatically generated from Active Directory or LDAP), but also can include insight into the external relationships with customers, suppliers, etc. that the organization's employees have developed over time.  This new and hybrid type of an 'extended organization chart' is a novel idea, and one that over time in many organizations could prove to be just as valuable as the traditional, internally facing org. chart.

These new features continue to strengthen Socialcast's position in the enterprise collaboration technology space, an increasingly crowded market where Socialcast competes with offerings from Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, and others.  Where Socialcast appears to have an edge, is in their realization and reaction to the changing ways of task and resource organization in many enterprises, the need for a collaboration solution to support much more flexible methods of collaboration beyond a separate and isolated tool, and with the ease of deployment and administration that allows the solution to take hold rapidly across and outside the enterprise.

I don't write too many 'new product announcement' type posts, because frankly, most of them are not all that interesting. But I have been a fan of the Socialcast platform for a while, have used the collaboration tool in some of my HR Technology classes, and do feel that in a crowded space that Socialcast has consistently had intelligent approaches and ideas to better enable enterprise (and beyond) forms of collaboration.

More and more, success for many organizations will be at least in part determined by how they can best manage and extract value from a disparate, diverse, and fluid ecosystem of internal and external resources, and products and solutions that can help manage and support this new framework offer organizations some clear opportunities and advantages.

You can learn more about Socialcast and today's announcement at www.socialcast.com.

Extending Your Reach

Yesterday enterprise collaboration vendor Socialcast announced availability of a new set of tools and capabilities called 'Reach', that enable easy integration of the Socialcast activity stream and microblogging platform to traditional enterprise systems like CRM, ERP, Sharepoint; and even newer tools such as wikis and blogs.

To appreciate why this is important let's take a step back to look at enterprise microblogging in general, and Socialcast in particular. Internal organizational microblogging, often referred to as 'Twitter for the Enterprise', has been around for some time.  Several vendors offer varied solutions in the space, the most notable and popular is probably Yammer, a service that has also recently improved and expanded its offerings.  Enterprise micoblogging has always offered important benefits and features for organizations, especially when compared to Twitter. 

Chief among these features are the ability to create secure, company-only networks, support for internal group formation, better functionality for sharing files and images, and less restriction (or no restriction at all), on the length of status updates beyond the Twitter-standard 140 characters. While the internal microblogging solutions have evolved, and continued to improve, they have to this point been somewhat limited in their attractiveness in many organizations due to their stand-alone deployment and their position as yet another enterprise system to be used, maintained, and monitored.  

Much like Twitter sort of 'exists' on its own, mostly separate from other applications and software services that people use for their work, enterprise microblogging has stood separate as well, and for many use cases or valuable forms of collaboration between and among company colleagues this has proven if not an absolute barrier, certainly as a constraint to more widespread organizational deployment.

Activity stream embedded on a wiki page

Socialcast has been in the enterprise collaboration space for a few years, and their microblogging and  'enterprise activity stream' solution is flexible (allowing integration of content from external networks like Twitter or RSS feeds), and easy to use and deploy.  Deployment options both on-premise or hosted make the solution more broadly appealing and able to meet varying IT organizations requirements.

The newest addition to the solution, Socialcast Reach,  takes an important step in addressing the isolation issue, by providing the capability to embed and extend the collaboration platform and activity stream directly to the classic enterprise applications where employees carry out their work.  By simply inserting some simply code, the Socialcast collaboration platform is instantly embedded inside the ERP, CRM, or the company wiki.  So when a sales rep has a question about price or product availability when updating a customer account in the CRM, they can ask a question in an embedded Socialcast collaboration widget, to which others in the company can respond from wherever they happen to be, in the CRM as well, in the Socialcast application, on their mobile device, or anywhere else that the platform has been extended.

In addition to the familiar microblogging activity stream paradigm, Reach also offers support for two other types of collaborative engagement. 'Discussions' -  focused discussions around key resources within your business that allows employees to engage in specific conversations related to customers, projects and operational metrics; and 'Recommendations' -  a way for a user to “recommend” via a button on any resource in the enterprise, and for that recommendation to be inserted into the Socialcast platform, surfacing that person’s recommendation for the enterprise.

If you have only experienced microblogging via Twitter, or even if you have tried an enterprise microblogging solution, this ability to weave and embed the collaboration backbone more deeply within the accepted and expected existing systems and workflows in the organization may be the most important development yet in actually driving increased levels of user adoption and accruing value from more systemic collaboration. 

For companies considering an enterprise microblogging or collaboration platform, Reach gives you another reason to check out Socialcast.  Driving richer and deeper collaboration inside the enterprise and ingrained as part of the organization's work practices is likely an important issue and concern in most enterprises today.  Talking about increased collaboration won't make it so, but deploying isolated tools and technologies might not either, and with 'Reach' Socialcast has created what might be the first collaboration solution that really understands that issue.