Socialtext vs Yammer

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.

Leading social software vendors Yammer, Jive, NewsGator updated their products and showed us the latest trends, transforming the corporate social networks. Yammer has released the desktop AIR-client (Win and Mac), added the ability to post videos in microblog posts, reward colleagues with badges for completed tasks (we have already seen such gamification in Rypple and Producteev), and realized the integration with NetSuite, reminding the bunch Salesforce + Chatter. NewsGator in its new version of NewsGator Social Sites 2 focused on improving the Sharepoint video capabilities (recall, Newsgator Social Sites works on top of the Sharepoint). Like in Yammer, videos can now be easily inserted into microblog messages and besides they are added to the video gallery (something like YouTube for the Enterprise) where all the social capabilities can also be utilized - comments, rating, likes:

In the past few days, the hype around Salesforce Chatter overshadows all other Enterprise 2.0 news. And of course, the developers of Chatter's main rival - Yammer have taken the chance to get a share of public attention and reminded Salesforce boss about how all this stuff was started. It started 3 years ago, when at the startup contest Techcrunch50 Yammer team introduced the world's first enterprise microblogging tool. Marc Benioff was the judge there and he expressed his excitement about the new service. And now, 3 years later Salesforce has introduced the Yammer's twin - Chatter.com. However, Yammer developers say that during those 3 years they where busy adding new features and have built much more advanced functionality and market progress. Yammer's progress is really amazing, but now it will be hard for them to compete with FREE Chatter.

One of the innovative Enterprise 2.0 trends is applications for business networks. These applications integrate groupware in partner companies and enable collaboration between them. Remember Salesforce to Salesforce or Freshbooks Software as a Network. The pioneer in enterprise microblogging Yammer also decided to join this trend and added the ability to create private b2b communities or workspaces. In single online space the representatives of various companies - customers, vendors, freelancers, partners can collaborate. Each of them has own profile, so that participants can learn more about each other. Every users can view the list of his networks and the number of new messages in each of them.