SocialCast offers a free 10-user social networking platform for the enterprise. It includes a twitter-like micro-blogging service as well as a friendfeed-like aggregator for your social profiles on other services such as Facebook, delicious, youtube, etc.
Yet Another Twitter for the Business?
Yes, there are a slew of twitter clones for the enterprise available these days like Yammer but the big difference here is that this service doesn’t require ever user to own the same email address domain. This means you can invite users with different email addresses. This comes in handy for organizations that include people who don’t all own the same email domain.
What’s Missing?
I think SocialCast does a good job for what it offers but in order for something like this to catch on in the enterprise it needs more meat on the bones. For example, documents are the lifeblood of every organization, not just communication tools such as telephone systems, emails, faxes, etc. Thus, enterprise content management (ECM) is critical for any enterprise platform. These social networks, inside or outside the firewall, must be able to connect people to the files and documents they need to share. Even if version control isn’t included, there must be a method for sharing documents in real-time. Perhaps provide a link to online storage services such as Dropbox or box.net.
The other important piece of the social corporate puzzle is time scheduling and management. There must be a way to view and access calendars in order to schedule events. This can also be social calendar services such as Google Calendar or Microsoft’s Live Calendar which can connect to Exchange/Outlook via Outlook connector.
There are other important elements that would be needed such as task and project management but that’s another story for another day. I think SocialCast is on the right track with this basic social networking service which combines Twitter and Friendfeed in a simple platform to use and manage.
Note: I have a sneaky suspicion that SalesForce can riverside all of these social enterprise services by launching their own SocialFORCE service that’ll integrate with Twitter and other social networks.
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