Posts tagged Socialcast
Socialcast Adds Thank You Notes
Feb 16th
Sometimes, it is the simplest of things that can matter a great deal to us. In this case, it is saying “thank you” to a coworker for a job well done. If you are using VMware’s Socialcast collaboration tool, now you can, through an add-on app that they call Thanks. It is almost so deliciously simple and obvious you wonder why they even thought of it? Well, I am glad they did.
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Here to testify on the importance of saying thank you is Laura Trice at her Ted Talk (the video isn’t up to their usual snuff, but the audio and her message is crystal clear):
The notion is to recognize peers inside your social network but do so in a more formalized and controlled way. Employees can send a thank you by selecting from a custom library of badges that a company makes available inside Socialcast. The idea is to remove yet another point of friction from your social network and make it easier to connect with your work colleagues. You can see a sample screenshot below.
There is no additional cost of the feature, and it is available starting today. On one beta user’s network, an average of five to seven thanks per month per employee were recorded. Companies can set up their thanks banks to make them more or less valuable and scarce.
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New Mobile Socialcast, Sliderocket Clients
Sep 27th
Socialcast and Sliderocket, which are both now a part of VMware, announced today new versions of their mobile clients for iPad and Android devices. Sliderocket is an app for mobile presentations and now offers a free iPad Player app. You download your presentation and can share them offline.
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Socialcast has a new iPad app and an updated Android one so that mobile workers can fully participate with threaded discussions and share files when on the road. The apps support the latest v2 of OAuth to make for more secure logins.
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Socialcast Makes Strides Towards Project Management
Sep 10th
Today Socialcast has announced the beta of Strides, its first big launch since VMware acquired them earlier this summer. Just connecting everyone on an internal social network isn’t enough – everyone has to actually use the network for their work activities. And Strides is bringing a lightweight Web 2.0 form of project management, layering it on top of the social networking tool.
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The Strides UI looks a lot like Google+. The left-hand pane has objectives and tasks that are scheduled for today and the future. The right-hand pane has the usual activity feed with streams, projects, tasks, and other activities, which is similar to the normal Socialcast activity stream. You can set due dates and reorder your priorities and see at a glance the status of all of your projects and the status of everyone else’s projects too. And you can attach projects to particular corporate goals.
You don’t need to be an existing Socialcast user; Strides operates independently. But it can connect to your Socialcast social graph and accounts if you do.
Competition
They claim that other social networking tools such as Jive, Lotus Connections and Socialtext (the latter covered here), have lighter-weight task and project features, and that dedicated project management tools are too cumbersome to use. But no matter how lightweight the features, you may still not want to use them. To really benefit from this product and be effective, you have to spend a lot of time devoted to updating your activities and type a lot into the system throughout your workday. That may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Socialcast’s CEO Tim Young, interviewed in a PwC Technology Forecast article, mentions that the major objection he hears from his customers who are slow to adopt his tech that they have trouble embedding it into their existing workflows. Strides is another way to try to tackle this, and make the data streams more relevant to these late adopters.
What is appealing about Strides (see a sample view above, click to enlarge) is that it combines the task and project management with a real-time messaging and activity feed stream, to try to embed the project into the user’s work day. But it could also be its biggest drawback, too, if a user doesn’t want to instrument and document his or her moment-by-moment work life.
While they haven’t yet announced pricing, you can sign up for the beta and they will gradually accept your requests. Once you get accepted, you can invite anyone else to join your work team for free of charge. About 50 organizations are presently testing it now, with one account as large as 3,500 users.
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Socialcast Adds External Collaboration and More
Jul 26th
We’ve always liked Socialcast here at ReadWriteWeb, but until it’s been lacking a major feature: the ability to invite external collaborators. While some companies – such as Huddle, Simplybox and newcomer Podio – have made external collaboration a key point, many major vendors have lagged in this area. So we’re glad to see external collaboration become a focus for Socialcast, which announced today a few new features.
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Socialcast was recently acquired by VMware (a ReadWriteWeb sponsor), and Socialcast founder and CEO Tim Young is now the VP of social enterprise at VMware. Young says that Socialcast’s focus has not changed. That seems to be true thus far, but the new features also certainly fit neatly with VMware’s cloud identity agenda. Socialcast collaborators are a new way to bring people into the VMware cloud.
Young describes companies as ecosystems which include both employees and people from outside the company, including partners, members of the supply chain, customers, etc. He compares Socialcast groups to Google Circles in that they can be used to filter who can see what. This fits with VMware’s promises to provide cross-application permissions management in the cloud via Project Horizon.
Another new feature is the addition of an org chart view of the Socialcast network (MangoSpring recently added a similar feature). The cloud identity twist here is that you can data from your LinkedIn profiles into the org chart.
Also, Socialcast is offering IT admins some relief by enabling them to grant certain users the ability to manage features such as external collaborators, analytics and integration tools so that every change to these systems need not go through IT.
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VMware Acquires Enterprise Microblogging Company Socialcast
May 31st
VMware announced today that it will acquire Socialcast, an enterprise microblogging and social network software-as-a-service. The move expands VMware’s software-as-a-service portfolio, which also includes Zimbra, Mozy and SlideRocket. VMware is owned by EMC.
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VMware has been expanding expanding its product line-up beyond virtualization in the past 18 months. It acquired the Web-based e-mail and office suite Zimbra from Yahoo in January of 2010. In April of this year it took control of Mozy and announced its cloud computing platform CloudFoundry. Later that month it acquired SlideRocket. This month it launched Horizon App Manager, a single sign-on service for various Web applications. App Manager is just one part of Project Horizon, VMware’s cloud identity initiative.
“We’re realizing there’s a new way to work using cloud applications,” says Brian Byun, VP of VMware’s Cloud Applications business unit.He says Project Horizon is at the core of VMware’s strategy for enterprise applications, but it’s about more than just connecting companies to existing applications. It’s about creating a whole new way of working.
When asked whether Socialcast and SlideRocket would become part of the Zimbra office suite, Byun said that VMware believes in the “Modular Web” and therefore the three services will remain distinct. However, he expects integrations will come soon. Socialcast wasn’t one of the apps initially supported by Horizon App Manager, but he does expect Socialcast support to be added in the near future.
Earlier this month Gary Orenstein wrote at GigaOM that VMware is “new Microsoft” but without an operating system. Robert Scoble agreed. It’s been a bit easy to forget Zimbra in the Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office 365 slugfest. Zimbra has been a bit quiet since VMware acquired it. But we have the feeling we’ll be seeing more action coming from VMware’s stable of Web applications in the near future.
It may not be as visible as competitors like Yammer and Salesforce.com Chatter, but Socialcast is one of the most successful enterprise microblogging companies out there, having landed companies like GM, NASA and Nokia as customers. Byun points out that even without a strong enterprise brand behind it Socialcast has built an impressive customer base. He expects that momentum to be even stronger thanks to VMware.
Socialcast has long been one of our favorite enterprise social software offerings. We called Socialcast one of our Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2009, and looked at how the company knocked it out of the park in 2010.
Socialcast is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2005. It was funded by True Ventures and Menlo Ventures.
Disclosure: VMware is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor
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