Since I last blogged about Socialtext Desktop and Signals, the guys have done a lot of work on the new features. So much so, they have released an appliance with just the Desktop, Signals and Profiles features - the Socialtext Microblogging Appliance. The fact that Socialtext, the poster-child wiki company, have now released a product without a wiki shows how far they have come, as well as where they are spending their energy and investment - on social networking features rather than wiki functionality.
Of the three big social networking platforms, Socialtext is the only one with an out of the box desktop client. Whilst Connections and Jive offer the ability to update statuses, Socialtext takes this a lot further and is clearly positioning Signalling as a core feature of the product. The desktop client should make significant waves in the market, given how people's use of Twitter changes for the better once they use desktop tools such as Twhirl or Tweetdeck. Put simply, it removes the barrier between thinking and contributing - a C-level exec can socialise their thoughts instantly, without having to worry about opening a browser, navigating to a page, logging in etc.
Whereas Signals was a widget on the Socialtext Dashboard, it now has a full page in its own right on the website. This allows people to focus on the Signals activity screen to pick up a sense of what is going on in their network. In the screenshot below you can see a comment about meeting up with a client, which is shared across the network so that intelligence can be informally shared. There are also public questions and answers which can be stored and referenced publicly, rather than locked away in email folders. There are also links to allow people to Signal interesting sites as they are browsing - a highly effective way of sharing links especially when compared to sending out emails, as well as downloading the client.
The client has received a lot of attention recently. Originally it showed Signals and the Activity stream of your network's activity throughout Socialtext. These are still there, but Socialtext have added Profile information and access to wiki workspaces as well.
Signals
Wiki workspaces
The ability to view wiki pages themselves through the desktop client is incredibly powerful - I can find the profile information of the owner and with one click be taken through to the wiki itself to edit the page. This dramatically reduces the individual cost to the users to participate - the barrier between thinking and collaborating is reduced to next to nothing.
If Socialtext Desktop does for Enterprise 2.0 what Twhirl and Tweetdeck have done for Twitter we could see significant increases in levels of adoption, especially amongst non-IT audiences. I would also expect to see the likes of Jive and Connections follow suit with similar offerings - they all have robust APIs which could support this.
If you would like to find out more, or see demonstrations of this or other enterprise grade collaboration platforms, please get in touch!
It's a very interesting move to offer it as fully preconfigured appliance. Think a lot of companies are looking for such a easy-to-use sandboxed environment.
One thing I do wonder about is what would get more demand: a physcial appliance or a virtual appliance (some image you can either on the Amazon cloud or in your own data center using VMWare or whatsoever).
Does it also plug into Exchange? (prolly in many companies the largest "social network":-p). Embracing Google Wave would be an interesting next step in these enterprise social networking suites in my opinion.
Lee