We have deep knowledge and experience of market-leading social platforms, and our engineering teams are capable to stretching, integrating and customising them to suit specific needs. We believe in creating what Clay Shirky called situated software - tools and systems that feel native to a particular context. Sometimes this can be done by integrating existing systems; sometimes it requires the freedom offered by pure custom development, and in this case we use a tried and tested agile development methodology to ensure our clients are involved in every stage of the process.
All-in-one platforms
IBM Connections
IBM Connections is a leading enterprise all-in-one social software platform. IBM has the benefit of being able to road-test various elements of social software among its 300,000 user workforce, and takes the best results of these experiments into their Connections product. The result is a lightweight but enterprise grade platform that excels at helping people find expertise within a large organisation. It is particularly useful in situations where large groups of people are brought together, such as in a merger or acquisition scenarios.
Connections integrates with Socialtext and Confluence to deliver best of breed wiki functionality, and we have relationships with all three companies, as well as technical skills in the relevant products.
Microsoft Sharepoint
Microsoft Sharepoint provides excellent document management and Office integration capabilities, and as such is a popular choice among IT departments. But deploying a successful Sharepoint-based social platform is not without its challenges. Headshift works with companies who want to explore the Sharepoint route by ensuring that they take advantage of its strengths, and avoid its weaknesses.
We are experts at taking the best document management features of Sharepoint, and integrating it with other best of breed components to provide a social layer around document management. Our clients find that this is a much more cost-effective and simpler way to enhance Sharepoint functionality compared to pure native Sharepoint development and customisation.
Best of breed platforms
We have deep technical skills in best-of-breed social platforms, and have integrated these products for our clients to produce smarter, simpler, social solutions that work for their users, rather than the other way round.
Confluence
Confluence in the market-leading enterprise wiki from Atlassian that has evolved some other useful social features such as status updates, social networking and blogging.
See here for a list of projects we have undertaken with Confluence.
Click here for more information about the product.
Movable Type
Movabe Type is a mature, extensible enterprise blogging system from SixApart, which can be used both internally and externally. It was used to power blogs for the Obama campaign, and some of the highest traffic blogs, such as BoingBoing, run on this software.
See here for a list of projects we have undertaken with Movable Type.
Click here for more information about the product.
Socialtext
Socialtext is an enterprise wiki platform that has developed a very useful ecosystem of related tools and add-ons, such as wikicalc, signals and unplugged; it is also compatible with OpenSocial. Available as a hosted solution, installed software or an appliance, Socialtext is very flexible to deploy.
Click here for more information about the product.
Jive Clearspace
Jive's Social Business Software platform is a mature and well designed platform for enterprise collaboration, which has a sister product for external customer communities.
Click here for more information about the product.
Newsgator
Newsgator is an enterprise news aggregation product, which delivers powerful RSS functionality; it's Social Sites platform is an excellent add-on to Microsoft Sharepoint, and provides a 'Facebook for the Enterprise' solution.
Click here for more information about the product.
Thoughtfarmer
Thoughtfarmer is a very interesting social intranet product for companies who are not comfortable with the full-on wiki approach and would like to have a traditional intranet with some social features.
Click here for more information about the product.
Custom development
Sometimes, the requirements for a smarter, simpler, social solution require a custom solution. We have an exceptionally strong Ruby on Rails team that have create bespoke solutions for our clients, but we also work with other open source tehcnologies (LAMP stack, Drupal) and proprietary frameworks such as .NET.
There are fantastic new open source tools emerging all the time, and so it is possible to put together a complete social stack using freely available code.
