Socialtext is promoting collaboration in the company a tweet at a time.
Most corporate intranets are little more than corporate newsletters: static, dead, boring. "You know what is the most visited page on the corporate intranet? Eugene Lee asked , CEO of Socialtext . "lunch menu in the cafeteria."
Socialtext, a company of nine years based in Palo Alto, California, is to make corporate intranets again become attractive. In the process, is changing the way corporate citizens collaborate.
The social enterprise technologies are often only a few things well, but many are rapidly adding new features and integrations with larger applications to try to be everything to everybody. Employees use popular services like Yammer and Socialcast , often on their own initiative, to share short messages a la Twitter and connect with each other as Facebook, for example. Socialtext involves this type of "activity stream" and a social network with a number of other tools, including blogs, wikis, collaborative spaces of documents, and labels that help people find information and experts on a topic.
A tool called Socialtext Signals allows employees to send in an unlimited number of characters, status updates and messages across the enterprise, a group of determined work, or just one person. The flow of new messages is displayed in a manner similar to Facebook's news feed, occupying a front and center on the home page of an employee. Each message, or signal, is part of a conversation indented in which employees can respond to comments, add links to content and label information.
Instead of being composed of random posts about what someone ate or read, most of Socialtext entries are automatically created as a result of collaboration with others. These updates about "workflow" occur when someone does something productive Socialtext others in the company should know, comment in an article in a blog, responding to a question, edit a wiki page or a profile tag. The idea is that people demonstrate their value to the company, not by what they tell themselves, but for what they do .
addition to the traditional information, such as the position of a person, location, and department, the labels may show work-related experience, areas of expertise, affiliations and interests working groups. Employees also can be labeled with information Socialtext profiles of others.
However, the software is not to promote a popularity contest. Revuleve all about productivity, not make friends at work. Socialtext has taken the approach of Twitter, where users choose to follow other users. The service works through a web browser, a desktop and mobile devices and can be hosted in the cloud or data center company.
At this time, several customers of Socialtext as Getty Images and the American Hospital Association (AHA, for its acronym in English) have already replaced their intranet pages by a panel of Socialtext. Before the AHA will implement Socialtext, employees had difficulty working together on issues of healthcare reform, says Karthikeyan Chakkarapani, director of technology solutions and operations. He states that the company was using up to 15 software applications as a service to facilitate collaboration.
Before deciding on Socialtext, half a dozen Chakkarapani applications investigated like, including Yammer , Jive Software and Salesforce.com 'Chatter . "The problem is that no one had an open architecture," says Chakkarapani. "With Socialtext, we were able to integrate it into our other business applications, and build a unique platform where people can easily access." The tools that AHA employees use most often are the flow of activity and wikis.
The organization has over 500 employees in 50 states, and works with hospitals in many small rural towns. Chakkarapani says that since the organization launched Socialtext in August 2010 communication and collaboration between remote employees and managers have improved significantly. With the new platform, members of the team were able to obtain updated information on projects more quickly, more easily share ideas and work together more productively.
Many other organizations are rushing to add social tools like tweets, posts and status updates. A 2010 survey by InsightExpress found that 77 percent of global businesses expect that their investment in collaboration tools to increase during the next year, with India and China among the most enthusiastic adopters.
While many companies understand the value of collaboration tools in breaking down information silos and functional, have trouble determining what tools work best for your organization and its employees. Many staff members want the freedom to use the tools they like with little oversight from the central IT department, but this often results in a mixture of incompatible applications.
A bigger problem is that the most popular tools all they do is encourage people to gossip about their work. Socialtext, however, is helping people to do their job. Socialtext emphasizes productivity.
In 2010, Socialtext launched an initiative called Connect Socialtext, which encourages developers to use their external application programming interface (API, for its acronym in English) to easily add new updates to the enterprise level the flow of activity. Companies can develop software agents that are pending certain events. When you close an order in Salesforce.com or edit a document in SharePoint, the flow of activity can show this fact.
In many ways, is analogous to the way the Facebook newsfeed can obtain information from external sites, says Lee. For example, a Socialtext update could be, 'John has updated the latest CRM record for the account of Acme Corporation. " When clicked on the message, it could redirect the user to a Salesforce.com record for more information. Under the message, Socialtext, co-workers could have a conversation about the steps they would take to get that account.
"If you are a provider of ERP or CRM, has become fashionable to add social features to your application, as with Salesforce.com Chatter of " says Lee. "The problem is that if companies use these applications as its approach to the adoption of social software, end up having a social network for your sales force and its application, one for her finance team and its implementation, and one for your product team, and so on. All these applications are isolated from each other, and one company will not get the cooperation between functions that transforms a business. Socialtext, however, is a layer that extends over the entire company. "Socialtext
aims to discover and share valuable information is often buried within the static intranets, inventory reaching low levels or increased complaints from customers overnight.
"Two years ago I have spent a lot of money and resources to implement social technologies within our organization, "said Chakkarapani. But now, says Chakkarapani, there are low-budget enterprise tools at hand.
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