There are a plethora of enterprise friendly collaboration platforms to choose from these days, with Yammer, Salesforce, Jive, Bantam Live, Socialcast, and others all vying for marketshare. All of the offerings are compelling but now more than ever, the startups and companies that develop these platforms are facing pressure to make their offerings the most appealing and feature-rich. Today, Socialtext, the developer of an enterprise social software platform built around microblogging, is rolling out a more powerful version, called Socialtext 4.0, of its collaboration applications.
One of the features users were asking for was the ability to create groups within their Socialtext applications. So now, you can create collaborative groups within your Socialtext app, that comes with a group home page including an activity stream of group member updates, a dedicated microblogging channel, and one or more workspaces. Collaborative Groups can be synced with other groups and can also be configured for privacy needs. A group can be listed, with its membership designated as either “request-to-join” or open. Alternatively, a group can be unlisted, which makes it completely private.
Users can now view the activity streams of any group that they belong too and can also filter the stream, by individual, the people you follow or see the stream of all the employees in the company. Users can also choose to publish their “Signals,” which are the Twitter-like short message sent on Socialtext, to one group or all the groups they belong to.
And, Socialtext has enhances search in the this new version, providing users the ability to browse and search messages sent by employees in a company. You can also filter your search by group or topic and see threaded conversations. As with many mircoblogging networks, you can now hover over a person’s avatar to see their presence, which lets teammates know who is reachable at a given moment.
Socialtext 4.0 is available on all of Socialtext’s deployment options, including its on-site managed appliance, desktop application,, mobile apps and web-based product. Socialtext’s collaboration tool has a freemium model and a paid service.
Socialtext’s offering is compelling for many businesses because of its on-premise offerings that provides security options unavailable in its cloud-based competitors. But as many companies are increasingly comfortable with placing their business operations and communication in the cloud, its wise for Socialtext to build out its platform to offer more functionality.