Socialtext 4.0

Watching Socialtext’s announcement this week about the newest major release of their flagship technology, I knew that had done some great work. I got the demo today, and it looks really great.

Socialtext has extended way past the baseline functionality that made them a pioneer in social technology for business. They started with wikis, and last year released Socialtext signals, an integrated enterprise microblogging capability which has been a big hit with customers. Now they have released a new social architecture that includes support for groups.

Above you can see the Signals activity stream, and the user is selecting a specific group to filter the stream: after selection, only those activities that were registered in the context of the selected group will be displayed.

Groups can be created by any user, and can be administered by one or more users. Members are invited by those with admin capabilities, and workspaces (wiki pages) can be created within groups or associated with groups.

Adding members is easy: you simply start typing the name and Socialtext autocompletes from the directory of known users. You can also invite people to participate in a group who are not in the current directory of users, such as inviting a consultant to participate on a project that is being managed as a group, and that user would only have access to that group, and not the entire Socialtext instance, or any other groups. (Actually, it seems that they could have simply named Socialtext ‘groups’ ‘projects’ instead, since they work in exactly the way that projects run.)

Once created, a group is a smaller instance of the complete Social text: it has an activity stream, members, workspaces, and so on.

A member of a group can enter the group to create content there, to interact with others, and see what’s been happening via the activity stream. Alternatively, activities from the group context percolate out to the user’s more general activity stream, as well. And the workspaces defined with groups can be accessed through the workspaces navigation, just like other workspaces, even when the user is outside the group.

Socialtext has also created a desktop client so that users can remain connected to their colleagues outside of a browser window. There are also mobile clients.

Conclusion

I don’t believe that deep analysis can come from such a cursory demo — that requires days or weeks of use — but at the same time it is clear to me that Socialtext has brought together a collection of social tools in a very well integrated framework.

The new group (or project) functionality allows a much finer grained social scale to be applied in the enterprise, which leads to sensible ways to minimize the torrent of upadtes in the activity stream. In fact, I don’t know how Socialtext users in large companies could have survived the assault of hundreds or thousands of fellow employees signaling every time they modified a document, had a question, or made a comment.

I asked about a threaded discussion display, because I had not seen one, and they showed me an alpha — not ready to be released yet — that supports that. It is very cool, and displays an arbitrary number of nested levels: it is not limited to one or a few levels of nesting.

So, all in all, a major step forward for Socialtext, and one that is likely to make their customers very happy.

[disclosure: Socialtext is a sponsor of the upcoming Social Business Edge, 19 April 2010 in NYC.]