Socialtext vs Confluence

The leading SaaS and Enterprise 2.0 vendors decided to make their business a little more "WOW". In the new show-channell called "I Choose the Cloud" the founders and executives of cloud companies appeal to join the cloud revolution. Because cloud applications mean not only simplicity, usability, speed and cost efficiency. They also mean the new exciting ways of running business. Because these applications are create not by serious gloomy IT-people in ties, but by such cool guys, who enjoy what they do. Guest stars: Aaron Levie (Box.net), Chuck Dietrich (SlideRocket), David Weekly (PBworks), Eugene Lee (Socialtext), Wendy Lea (Get Satisfaction), Clint Oram (SugarCRM), Tien Tzuo (Zuora), Matt Brezina (Xobni)

Socialtext has released version 4.0 of its enterprise social platform, and the main new feature is the ability to create groups. At first glance it seems that it's a little feature, and the new release is issued only for PR. However, all genious is simple, and Socialtext - is one of those companies that earn good money on these things. Groups - online spaces for communication and collaboration - are important for enterprise. These may be department-centric spaces, or workspaces for project teams, or communities of interest (yes, they are also useful for business, as they bring staff together). But how easy it is to create an online group space, for example, in Sharepoint? It's complicated enough for not creating it at all.

(Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch CEO)MindTouch - it an enterprise open source Wiki-platform, that grew out of the MediaWiki CMS. MindTouch is deployed by many large companies, including Microsoft, Fujitsu, Siemens, Intel, The Washington Post, and others. And Forrester recently called MindTouch the best alternative to Sharepoint and Lotus. But the most interesting is that MindTouch founder and CEO, Aaron Fulkerson - is an outspoken opponent of Social software, that most people now perceive as the main trend of Enterprise 2.0. He is confident that the main MindTouch competitors - SocialText and PBWiki - are going the wrong direction, adding more and more social tools to their wiki-systems. In contrast to enterprise Social Networks, Fulkerson invented a new concept - Collaborative Networks, and in accordance with this concept the MindTouch is developed.

Social Software adopts consumer web achievements (wikis, blogs, profiles, tags, ratings, social connections, people search, micro-blogging) in the enterprise environment. Of course, today almost all software vendors say that their software provides social computing, but in most cases it's only PR pitches and their software is not really social. At the same time there are few "native social software" solutions, that provide a social layer for company intranet and really enable it to achieve the social software objectives: create enterprise-wide community and improve collaboration. The most successful on this market are 3 solutions: Jive SBS, SocialText and NewsGator Social Sites.

Atlassian has launched the new SaaS service Atlassian OnDemand, which includes its popular tools for managing software development projects: JIRA (issue-tracker), Confluence (wiki), GreenHopper (Agile Project Management), Bonfire (bug reporter), FishEye (code manager), Crucible (code review) and Bamboo (integration). All products in the SaaS version provide the full functionality of the installable counterparts. There are only minimal restrictions on the tool integration and use of the custom plug-ins. You can turn on/off the tools as needed. The service pricing is traditional for Atlassian - "everything for $10 for 10 users." Recall that the company is also selling the 10-user leniences of the same installable products for $10. So you can either buy the product for $10, or rent it for $10/month.