Rhymes with Cars

If you've been following my posts recently, you've undoubtedly noticed that the recent posts have been about people, the content that they create and why it is important to be able to find those people. Content is good, but being able to identify its creator and connect to that person is significantly more valuable, especially as it pertains to enterprise data. These were extremely subtle hints of things to come from Socialtext. Well, those things have come! We are all extremely happy to announce that we are launching two exciting, major new features to the wiki foundation; Socialtext Dashboard & Socialtext People.

• 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's profiles, making group forming as simple as adding a tag.
• 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 they find productive for them.

In other words, users of Socialtext services will have the ability to easily find the information that they rely on, both internally and externally to their company. They will also have the ability identify who in their organization created the content that they are interested in and form an immediate relationship with that person. Expertise finding. The old adage holds true 'It's not what you know, but who you know.' We are making it easier to know both what (wiki and blog content) and who (the content creator). We have also identified 4-consistent business use cases and have announced that we have built specific practice areas around them. These areas 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
• Business Social Networks for partners and customers, as implemented for market leaders including United Business Media and Epitaph Records

Over the next day or so, I'll add some more color around each of these use cases. We are really jazzed about this. The services that we offer are a really strong part of our business. We are probably never going to be a company that throws a CD over the wall and wishes you good luck. Identifying these consistent use cases and building business practices around how to design & deploy business social networks in these areas will ensure our clients success. In short, it is a good time to be at Socialtext and it truly is, all about the people.