What we’ve discovered is when features are held back by a metered pricing structure employees don’t get to experience the full value of social at their company. Limited networks don’t deliver on the capabilities of enterprise social beyond just collaboration and communication among employees. There’s a much deeper set of use cases and we’re eager to spur enterprise social along.

Also, time and time again we’ve heard from IT departments that have to pull the plug on a freemium enterprise social network because the they need access to essential administration and security functionality. Nobody wins when this happens. There’s a way to blend the necessities of protecting company IP with a great user experience, but that doesn’t start by circumventing the IT policies that keep company data and employees safe.

Enterprise social networks are on their way to becoming an essential part of the workplace experience – according to Forrester 49% of companies will have investments in social networking solutions in 2012. Many people discover enterprise social through a limited, free version that starts with a small group of employees looking for a better way to work. Quickly, we see the way social changed person interactions changes the way they work – bringing teams closer together, working faster and aligning a company by breaking down silos of information created by departments and geography.

Freemium has been a great sharing model that’s helped people discover how transformative social can be for the enterprise. With fully free communities, we can give a great user experience and help companies realize the full potential of enterprise social at their company.

Starting with a free Socialcast community allows access to the rich set of features to create a complete enterprise social network that will unite the people, applications and information in your company. If you’ve heard about enterprise social but haven’t signed up yet, now is the time to get started. Any organization can sign up for a free Socialcast community at www.socialcast.com/free50.

For more information about the free Socialcast communities check out our Free FAQ

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Over 80% of the US workforce works in offices managing information, yet they rely on tools and systems that automate the metaphors of the pre-digital workplace. At a time when our economy desperately needs a productivity revolution, we need to fundamentally change the way we manage and coordinate information. As we enter the Post-PC era, VMware is committed to building new platforms and experiences that will dramatically evolve the way we work.

Today, VMware and Socialcast are announcing a product that will do just that–Strides. Strides is a lightweight social application that allows managers and employees to coordinate work efforts together in real time. It’s a simple tool that blends the principles of enterprise social networking with efficient task management.

It’s our belief that most enterprise social software is lacking in the area of definitive planning. Through conversations with key customers, inter-disciplinary research focused on understanding what makes work rewarding, and self-reflection upon how we ourselves work and what could be improved, we realized there was an opportunity to provide structured experiences built on top of a social layer. Strides was born as a result of identifying three primary pain points that today’s businesses face related to coordinating work efforts.

Business Agility. Managers and employees don’t always focus on, or prioritize the right work to drive business outcomes.

• Need: Allow managers to coach and align employees on business priorities to accomplish company objectives.
• Need: Empower employees to choose projects to work on that are important to their team and company.

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In simpler terms, a company doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it is part of, and relies upon, many others in order to succeed.

Today, Socialcast is announcing several new features that employ this concept: external contributors, enhanced user roles, and organizational charts. Until today, our platform was only available for the employees inside an organization, and there were two distinct roles that these employees could have (a user or an administrator). Now, we are introducing features that permit secure, role-based collaboration amongst employees and non-employees inside a Socialcast community, complete with the appropriate context around each user’s permissions, reporting structure, and role within the communication ecosystem.

While this may seem simple on the surface, creating these new user roles and permissions in a secure fashion was our number one priority. We then wanted to ensure a user experience for both employees and externals that made sense – rather than creating another siloed customer community or allowing vendors to see all of the same data as an employee, we needed to work within the structure of the Socialcast platform, Active Directory integrations, SSO integrations, and both cloud and on-premise hosting models. The result is what we are announcing today – a complete set of roles and permissions that give communication capabilities and context for the entire ecosystem of a company.

The external contributors feature allows companies to securely integrate third party contributors such as partners, vendors, contractors and customers into their existing Socialcast community using designated private groups. Externals and employees can collaborate inside of a company’s existing Socialcast community, giving employees access to all content and external contributors a limited view to only relevant discussions.

The new organizational chart feature maps the formal reporting structure of both employees and external contributors. Understanding “who’s who” based on titles and roles in a company, and which external partners or third party contributor a co-worker is working with, gives context to a user’s profile.

Finally, the introduction of additional user roles allows administrators to create multiple permission schemes for employees, external users, IT staff, and community managers. We’ve added a variety of roles that give limited access to advanced features, such as viewing analytics and creating SharePoint extensions, to designated employees. This empowers more individual employees to provide select administrative roles with Socialcast Reach, Social Business Intelligence analytics, Town Hall, and External Contributors, without giving them full community management access.

Together, these new features represent the future of enterprise collaboration – a flow of information that transcends necessary boundaries while respecting individual companies’ security needs.

Read the press release here.

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VMware and Socialcast are a natural fit for each other. Both companies seek to transform the way that employees work in an increasingly mobile, virtual landscape. We share the same vision for the future of collaboration – secure access to data, access on-the-go via mobile devices and remote workspaces, and support for modern work streams that are increasingly more iterative and interconnected.

Socialcast and VMware have had a strong relationship for quite some time. Socialcast has built its on premise offering on a VMware virtual appliance, which is the deployment method of choice for about 40% of our customers. VMware also uses Socialcast internally for its own collaboration needs. Now, we’ll be able to combine efforts to bring both innovative collaboration solutions that are value-based to our customers.

So what does this mean for you?

Most importantly, the people of Socialcast are going to continue to be here to guide your deployments, offer advice, provide support, and build a relationship with you. Both the leadership and employee base will continue to work on the Socialcast product. Our people are our strongest asset, and you’ll enjoy the same relationship you always have.

Next, the Socialcast product – it’s still on track to be the most engaging, productivity-driving, innovative platform available. VMware believes in our roadmap and vision and they’ve committed significant resources to accelerating our technical growth. Our three delivery models will still be available. We continue to be very excited about several upcoming Socialcast product announcements that follow on the heels of Socialcast Reach, showing our ongoing commitment to industry-leading innovation. Watch for those announcements in the coming months.

Third, support and infrastructure – the Socialcast support team will continue to support your help desk requests for the time being. Over time, our processes and technology for support will be integrated with those at VMware.

As always, we thank our customers and supporters for their partnership. We are very excited for this next chapter in Socialcast’s story, and we look forward to you continuing the journey with us.

For more details, please feel free to read my personal blog post about today’s acquisition announcement.

The post Socialcast announces its acquisition by VMware – accelerating our innovation and growth appeared first on Socialcast | Enterprise Social Network Platform.

The Socialcast Reach extension that we launched in October, 2010 has been critical to the proliferation of Socialcast across entire companies because it has enabled hundreds of thousands of employees to access their community across intranets, SharePoint, CRM systems, and their other business systems. Historically, enterprise collaboration has created new knowledge silos with each new attempt at knowledge management and information sharing. An intranet, a community of practice, and groupware, for example, have each been deployed as some supposedly transformative system, only to see each one become yet another silo to search when attempting to find information. Today, Socialcast Reach embeds the conversation inside these systems while linking discussions from across these multiple disparate silos, creating a unified view of embedded, contextual collaboration across and from within each system. Its goals are to:

• Deliver work where employees need it by extending the conversation into existing critical business tools
• Keep employees focused in context of the work they are doing
• Remove the need for new applications as critical business data is already accessible through key enterprise systems

The combination of Socialcast plus Reach has made significant increases in production and business interaction due to the cross-functional visibility that Reach allows when embedded in core business applications. Customers agree – 90% of our customer base has purchased the Reach functionality in the six months that it has been in the market.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Socialcast will now be including Reach in all of its premium enterprise licensing packages. It is our goal to help customers grow their networks quickly and easily by embedding Socialcast into their existing business systems. We know, as do our customers, that Reach will empower companies and their employees to collaborate and share more effectively than ever before. Once employees are active in the Socialcast conversations, they will be able to interact with each other via Reach, our core web application, native mobile applications, deep Outlook integration, and a standalone desktop option. Employees will be highly engaged as they are able to communicate via their application and device of choice – giving them flexibility not found in any other software on the market today.

Our customers are extremely active in using Reach to add a social layer to SharePoint 2010, create a real-time feedback loop in CRM systems like SalesForce.com, and displaying company-wide discussions on intranet pages. Socialcast Reach has quickly demonstrated the ability to serve as the conversational layer that unites disparate business systems and, most importantly, create employee engagement and business value. We are looking forward to many more customers exploring the possibilities as Reach continues to gain traction in the enterprise.

The post Embedded Contextual Collaboration with Socialcast Reach appeared first on Socialcast | Enterprise Social Network Platform.

The best answer to these questions has come from doing a significant amount of research in exception handling and management in the enterprise. I’ve had the pleasure of participating in the Deloitte Center for the Edge workshops, lead by John Hagel (who writes a phenomenal blog for the Harvard Business Review alongside John Seeley Brown, whom I’ve taught with at UC Irvine’s MBA program). These workshops have taken the idea of exceptions out of the realm of software programming and brought them into the daily workflow of everyday employees. Now, when clients ask about ROI and practical applications of social networks, we respond with our findings from our own clients as well as what we’ve discussed at the Center for the Edge.

What does exception handling mean for companies and employees? A practical definition is the time that employees – both management and front line workers – spend managing the non-routine tasks that must be addressed even though they occur outside the realm of standard daily business operations. It’s the things that just come up and disrupt someone’s workflow, requiring special time and attention.

Examples from our client base include:

• Unexpectedly low inventory of specific book titles at online retailers
• A company’s email domain is blacklisted suddenly

Other examples in the enterprise include:

• Order placed for discontinued product with no direct replacement found
• Quality Assurance finds a product defect, resulting in a manufacturing hold
• Sales Team processes an order for a new client with special requirements
• Customer support requested for a discontinued product

All of these everyday issues are common, and yet we haven’t found a way to easily mitigate both the issue and the time it takes away from our other work. You see, when an exception happens, we have to step away from our PowerPoint, stop typing an email, or exit a meeting in order to take care of it. Routine work stops. And, our modern reliance on technology to find, aggregate, and alert us to these exceptions has made the task of managing them more burdensome than ever before. Systems that manage exceptions provide the enterprise with vast amounts of data points that have become overwhelming for employees to handle. The applications that we rely on for managing exceptions still rely on process owners to make decisions and respond to the issues. The result is a workforce that isn’t dealing with exceptions well at all. According to Protivitti, decision-making and related actions around exceptions occur slowly and ineffectively for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Deaf Ears – Messages requesting action on an internal control issue languish in e-mail boxes and on voice mail systems
• Burnout – Process owners grow weary of repeated requests to address exceptions, even as they are in the process resolving them
• Erroneous Exceptions – Communication breakdowns between internal audit teams and their operational partners result in identification of too many “false positives” – exceptions that should not be classified as exceptions at all.

The communication breakdown around the alerts can dramatically affect how these exceptions are managed. What if the email alert for an exception goes to the inbox of an employee on vacation, or is sent to a terminated employee because the system was never updated? This could lead to months of time before any follow-up to the alert is even initiated. Even if the email is sent to the correct person, this could involve significant back-and-forth that creates an information silo.

Unfortunately, we can’t just sweep exceptions under the rug. Many exceptions often require swift response, as they are customer-centric or affect the bottom line. In fact, it’s easy to tie certain exceptions to company KPIs such as profit, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and employee productivity. The low inventory at our client’s online retailer? This directly affects the client’s profit, as not enough inventory means not enough product sold. A severe customer support issue is equally important, affecting both satisfaction and retention of a company’s most important asset – its customers. It’s clear why companies must focus on exception management, then. But until now, there hasn’t been a clear, efficient way of tackling this challenge.

The answer is an enterprise activity stream – a social network that talks directly with exception handling systems while simultaneously allowing employees to collaborate on the solution. Enterprise social networks already eliminate knowledge silos and enable open communication across all levels of the enterprise. Adapting exception management applications to utilize this collaborative arena can eliminate many of the decision and communication issues related to limited communication methods currently used, like email. Alerts can now be seen in a community of operators who handle these exceptions, allowing for a collaborative effort, in real-time, providing faster resolutions. They can be accessed via mobile phone, or at home via the web. Visibility into exceptions is now more widespread, making finding the answer easier than before.

Social networks in the enterprise create a permanent “home” for these exceptions to live where users can communicate and collaborate around the answers. Exception management through social networks gives management clear insight into the resources needed for handling these exceptions. Viewing or monitoring the interactions and necessary actions taken to resolve these exceptions can lead to better implementation, revisions or training on these systems, and increase productivity throughout the enterprise.

Faster resolution management of these exceptions will also help keep key performance indicators reporting positive results for the enterprise. This adaptation of social networks and the activity stream produces measurable ROI on social network’s role in the enterprise. Where better collaboration amongst employees isn’t currently seen as measurable ROI, integrating social networks into exception management can yield measurable results. Better, faster and more responsive management of these exceptions will measurably show against key performance indicators, demonstrating the ROI of implementing social networks in the enterprise.

The post Exception Handling – What is the ROI of an Employee Social Network? appeared first on Socialcast | Enterprise Social Network Platform.

Email no longer rules the communication dictatorship in the office. In the past several years, new forms of communication have begun to appear, pushing email off its throne. Gen Y helped usher in this shift, using new tools like Facebook and Twitter to reduce their dependency on email to communicate. The general corporate population has simultaneously lost its patience with email’s “in your face” nature; since email addresses tend to be public knowledge in a company, internal email systems have essentially given permission for any employee to contact another and demand a response. Our patience is worn thin, and the alternatives are now clear. We’ve begun a revolution that will put email in its place: in the ground.

Now, it would be naïve to say that email is going to quietly accept its death sentence and leave us to bask in our newly found productivity. What kind of villain would go without a fight? Email may be dead, but it’s not going to disappear. Email is like a zombie or a vampire – it’s going to hover and haunt us when we least expect it. The living dead of communication forms, email will cling ruthlessly to its final breaths as Activity Streams methodically take their place as the dominant form of corporate communication.

There are a variety of key components to the death of email and rise of Activity Streams. Today, we’ll examine some of the key workplace communication issues that are driving this fundamental shift.

Information Overload

Email has created an overload of unnecessary communication. On average, corporate email users sent and received an estimated 160 emails per day at the end of 2009¹. With this vast number of messages demanding our attention, email clients haven’t adapted to the increase in traffic, leaving inboxes full of messages that are ignored due to a lack of workflow management capabilities. This information overload has become a productivity drain, triggering nothing more than a conditioned Pavlovian response to read and write when the proverbial bell tells us to do so.

Information Fragmentation

Email by nature must have defined recipients, making messages a unilateral communication tool that doesn’t leverage the collective intelligence of an organization. It’s a very one-to-one system, making who you know more critical than the information itself. The result is that information silos exist across organizations, making knowledge unattainable to others who could benefit from shared data. Further, all email is identically weighted, providing no hierarchy of importance on a per-message basis. Users must rely on a subject line or little red flag to signal urgency or importance, and even these signals can be abused. How does one know which emails to read, and what information must be shared right away? Oftentimes critical messages are lost amongst heavy email traffic, eradicating the urgency of a message altogether.

Information SPAM

For most of the past decade, email has typically been a free form of communication. But like anything free, it has been misused and taken advantage of. For example, the real epidemic of SPAM affects all email users, and continues to require more and more resources to combat it. It’s estimated that 68.6% of arriving email is SPAM¹. Filters have helped weed through SPAM, but often run the risk of relegating legitimate email to the SPAM folder. Even worse, some SPAM attempts to cause harm to your system or obtain private information. SPAM has eroded our trust in email, causing us to expect that a large quantity of our incoming messages will be illegitimate.

“Occupational SPAM” is a real problem in most organizations as well. This type of SPAM comes from messages that well-meaning or unknowing senders think are important, but actually cause chaos and information overload for recipients. Corporate email inboxes are littered with “CC” and “Reply All” messages sent to dozens and even hundreds of colleagues, even though they have no relevance to most recipients and are viewed as a nuisance. Habitual abusers inside a company will eventually be overlooked altogether as recipients start to ignore messages from the worst offenders. This becomes a problem when the offender actually has something important to say, but is ignored.

New Communication Growth

Despite these shortcomings, the email user base continues to grow. At the same time, new types of communication are growing at a faster rate. According to Nielson Co., in August of 2009, 276.9 million people across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil used email, up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. In the same time period, users of social networks and other community sites grew by 31% to 301.5 million people. These networks have provided a new form of communication that is being adopted at a much faster rate than email. These new networks have provided society a new way to share and consume information, delivering on expectations about when and how data should be delivered. Have you noticed how we tend to want everything faster? This is a product of our real-time culture, ushered in by social networks.

In a time when society has become impatient with waiting for anything, why are we still waiting on email? Social networking sites have given us the ability to communicate on our time, and more often than not, it’s real-time. Email simply can’t accommodate this new need for right-now information. Social networks have eliminated the need to write an email to friends and family, and have empowered us to consume the information if they choose, when they choose. In the same vein, social networks can help organizations solve many of email’s shortcomings.

Activity Streams: The Email Killer

A communication shift is happening as users look to blow the top off information silos and let knowledge flow freely without the constraints, frustrations and loss in productivity email brings. The solution to the information overload, fragmentation and spam epidemic is Activity Streams. The real email killer, Activity Streams are the future of communication, uniting people, data, and applications in a real-time central, accessible, and virtual interface. Think of a social network where every user, system, and business process could exchange up-to-the-minute information about their activities and outcomes. Now, instead of pockets of knowledge, employees will have one central nervous system that unifies every piece of an organization’s information.

Activity Streams will fundamentally change how organizations function, unlocking the vast amount of information generated by everyday operations and making it instantly available across previously defined boundaries. Activity Streams humanize every process inside an organization, adding a social layer to data and opening up real-time collaboration. This new found freedom of better information flow will be the nail in the coffin for email. Email will continue to haunt us as we experience the communication revolution happening with Activity Streams. At the same time, we’ll begin to thrive as we witness and experience the renaissance of social enterprise communication, moving closer each day to email becoming a burden of the past.

NOTE:
1. Jones, William P. “Keeping Found Things Found” 2008

The post Social Networks Spur the Demise of Email in the Workplace appeared first on Socialcast | Enterprise Social Network Platform.

VMware and Socialcast are a natural fit for each other. Both companies seek to transform the way that employees work in an increasingly mobile, virtual landscape. We share the same vision for the future of collaboration – secure access to data, access on-the-go via mobile devices and remote workspaces, and support for modern work streams that are increasingly more iterative and interconnected.

Socialcast and VMware have had a strong relationship for quite some time. Socialcast has built its on premise offering on a VMware virtual appliance, which is the deployment method of choice for about 40% of our customers. VMware also uses Socialcast internally for its own collaboration needs. Now, we’ll be able to combine efforts to bring both innovative collaboration solutions that are value-based to our customers.

So what does this mean for you?

Most importantly, the people of Socialcast are going to continue to be here to guide your deployments, offer advice, provide support, and build a relationship with you. Both the leadership and employee base will continue to work on the Socialcast product. Our people are our strongest asset, and you’ll enjoy the same relationship you always have.

Next, the Socialcast product – it’s still on track to be the most engaging, productivity-driving, innovative platform available. VMware believes in our roadmap and vision and they’ve committed significant resources to accelerating our technical growth. Our three delivery models will still be available. We continue to be very excited about several upcoming Socialcast product announcements that follow on the heels of Socialcast Reach, showing our ongoing commitment to industry-leading innovation. Watch for those announcements in the coming months.

Third, support and infrastructure – the Socialcast support team will continue to support your help desk requests for the time being. Over time, our processes and technology for support will be integrated with those at VMware.

As always, we thank our customers and supporters for their partnership. We are very excited for this next chapter in Socialcast’s story, and we look forward to you continuing the journey with us.

For more details, please feel free to read my personal blog post about today’s acquisition announcement.

The post Socialcast announces its acquisition by VMware – accelerating our innovation and growth appeared first on Socialcast | Enterprise Social Network Platform.

I spend hours every day reading news about how to use social media and all the ramifications (positive and negative) that come with it. Social media is evolving quickly and it has been a challenge not only for myself, but also for most Gen Y employees to learn what is acceptable to post and what isn’t. Where do you cross the line between personal and professional – or is there really even a line?

Recent social media scandals show that people often forget that the world is watching everything they do when it is on the Internet. The infamous “Cisco Fatty” incident showed just how much employers are watching social media outlets for anything and everything involving their company. Tweeting about how much you are going to hate the work of a job you just got hired to do is the quickest way to lose it. It’s a dose of reality that new employees have to learn – you’re being watched online.

To some degree, employees are to companies what athletes are to sports teams. Recently, athletes have been causing quite a stir with inappropriate tweets; as people who are always in the spotlight, it is surprising what they are putting out on the web.

Minnesota Vikings’ Bernard Berrian recently tweeted about a teammate spraining a knee ligament at practice and that he would be out for the rest of the season. The player then tried to cover his tracks and tweeted that his teammate would return in a few games. However, he had exposed his teammate by announcing his injury over Twitter for opponents to exploit and for the media to write about. How is this any different than a corporate employee tweeting about his or her own company’s proprietary information? Social media provides an outlet for fans to get close to celebrities, but as “Cisco Fatty” found out, anyone can be a celebrity via social media. Just like professional athletes, corporate employees must be cautious about what they tweet.

Although this sounds like a public relations nightmare, it’s not. In my time at Socialcast, I’ve learned that there are ways to use social media properly and a way to use it poorly. The more word-of-mouth buzz there is about a company, the more recognizable the brand, and the more people will watch their social media activity. Shaquille O’Neal has over 1.8 million followers on Twitter. He spends his time tweeting about anything and everything. During basketball season, Shaq created intense excitement by tweeting during halftime of Cavaliers games. He got people to watch him by using Twitter – just as companies like Socialcast hope to engage customers using Social media.

So what have I learned? I have learned that anyone can gain attention using social media. People are watching all the time, and the idea of private versus work life has disappeared as social media becomes more prevalent in the workplace. However, with the incoming workforce being well versed in social media, companies and sports teams alike cannot shy away from social media out of fear. They should educate themselves on how to use the sites properly so that they can take full advantage of the public platform that social media provides.

The post To Tweet or not to Tweet: the shared responsibility of corporate employees and superstar athletes appeared first on Socialcast | Enterprise Social Network Platform.

The Socialcast API includes a robust set of operations to interact with your company’s stream messages. Documentation and command line examples for how to interact with the API can be found by logging into your community, clicking on “Tools” in the top navigation bar, and then “integrate with the Socialcast developer API” at the bottom of the list.

Our own Socialcast desktop application is built with the Socialcast API, and we hope that our clients will enjoy creating their own applications that fit into their company’s workflow and needs.

We encourage developer feedback and questions. If you have any questions or suggestions, please visit our API developer support group or contact us at support@socialcast.com

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