Socialcast Rolls Out New Features
Socialcast today announced a new set of tools for real-time collaboration, making it the first enterprise social networking solution to offer secure workspaces with external team members.
"We saw a lot of value in highlighting these relationships for all companies," explains Tim Young, founder of Socialcast and vice president of social enterprise at VMware. "Our customers now have the ability not only to connect with people in their own company but also collaborate with people outside securely."
The external contributors tool is a new premium feature that extends its enterprise collaboration platform. According to Young, when combined with Socialcast Reach, a feature that enables in-context views of relevant conversations across business systems, users can collaborate instantly with employees, partners, vendors, contractors, and customers.
"The success of consumer social networks ignited a movement, bringing tools into the workplace to help internal employees communicate more effectively" Young says. "Modern organizations operate on a global scale with distributed workforces that rely on a complex ecosystem of partners to get work done.
"Unlike other solutions that require the creation of separate silos for external communities, Socialcast securely integrates external contributors into existing enterprise work streams," he continues. "Virtual teams now have the tools to support the way people naturally engage and get work done in today's global marketplace."
In addition, Socialcast added user roles and organization to its solution. User roles enables community administrators or IT within large enterprises to create permission-based access to premium features such as Reach, Social Business Analytics, and External Contributors. Org Charts lays out the director of the enterprise for users.
Socialcast was acquired by VMware in May and Young says the company has additional goals for the future. "We quickly grew up," he says. "We constantly ask ourselves 'how do we increase collaboration and business performance using the same community paradigms as seen on Facebook and Twitter?'"
The solution's updates are now available at no additional price to existing customers. Users in the cloud can simply download the new version while those using Socialcast with on-premise servers will need to update their solutions. New customers can purchase Socialcast at $3 to $5 per user per month depending on the size of the enterprise's employee base.