Socialtext enterprise wiki getting social network features

Socialtext, the corporate wiki provider that dates back to 2003, is announcing a number of updates that founder Ross Mayfield calls one of the most significant updates in the company’s history. Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People, the two main products being released, have a familiar feature set for those of us that closely following the consumer social networking scene. But as Mayfield told me, similar to earlier versions of Socialtext, much of the product strategy is grounded in applying innovations taking place on the consumer side of the Web to much slower moving, conservative enterprise customers.

Facebook for the Enterprise?

The first product, Socialtext People, is essentially building an internal social network ontop of the company’s existing wiki software. Whereas wikis are traditionally fairly anonymous, with Socialtext People, users get profiles, buddy lists, and tags, though, in a more businessy sense. For example, while on Facebook you might list your interests as “snowboarding, tv, and Italian food,” in your enterprise Socialtext People implementation, you might list them as “marketing, product development, and Python.” Thus, the idea is that through Socialtext wikis, you can now not only find the content you’re looking for, but also the people best suited to help you solve a problem.

Meanwhile, if Socialtext People is Facebook for the corporation, the company’s other major release, Socialtext Dashboard, is its Netvibes. Dashboard is a widget-based start page, that allows you to keep track of both different content and people in your organization. You can see recent updates from the people you “follow” through an activity stream (Facebook News Feed for the enterprise), import any RSS feed as a widget, or install any widget that uses the OpenSocial gadgets standard. There’s also a calendar feature, which takes you to a wiki page for a specific day that can be edited by anyone in the company.

Getting Employees to Actually Use It

Overall, as someone that sits on the consumer side of the social networking space 98% of the time, it does look like Socialtext has done a nice job with applying “best practices” to enterprise social networking. The challenge, of course, is getting employees within a corporation to actually adopt and use these tools. To that end, Socialtext is launching four different “solution areas,” which they describe as follows:

Collaborative Intelligence for sales and marketing, as implemented for market leaders including Humana and SAP

Participatory Knowledgebase for service and support, as implemented for market leaders including Symantec and Microstrategy

Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services, as implemented for market leaders including MWW Group and CoActive Marketing Group

Business Social Networks for partners and customers, as implemented for market leaders including United Business Media and Epitaph Records

Competition

Since I covered the Salesforce-Google Apps deal earlier in this week (two enterprise software stories in one week, what’s going on here?), I asked Mayfield about how he perceived competition in the rest of the market. While he sees Google and Salesforce as two companies that are definitely helping drive adoption of web-based, software-as-a-service business models, the whole “no software” shtick is more marketing than anything else from Salesforce, he says. He tells me many of Socialtext’s clients actually prefer to have their software implemented “behind the firewall,” which is why his company offers not only a hosted version, but a server appliance and an open source option as well.

As for Socialtext People and Dashboard, they are currently in beta with several customers, and will be commercially available in 90 days according to Mayfield. It’s also worth noting that this release is the first major announcement from Socialtext since Mayfield was replaced by Eugene Lee in the CEO slot in November (when the company also announced a fresh $9.5 million financing round).