Socialcast Enhances Corporate Social Networking

Corporate social networking provider Socialcast has released a number of enhancements to its SaaS-based social networking solution. Enhancements designed to capture employee knowledge and share it with everyone.They've been around since 2005, but this is the first time we've covered the California based company. Their SaaS offering is a private white label social networking solution that combines the traditional corporate Intranet with social networking. They were at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, so you might have seen them there demoing their solution.Functionality currently provided includes:* User Profiles - of course* Ideas - Contribute and vote on creative ideas* Groups - Join a group with similar interests or knowledge* Questions - Ask topic-specific questions* Pages - Similar to a wiki or a small website* News - Including bulletins and announcements* Reputation Points - Rank users by their contribution* Compliments - It's like kudos or slapping 'em on the back saying "good job"

Socialcast Home page

Enhancements

There are several enhancements to the social networking solution:

Mini User Profiles

This is a subset of a user profile showing things such as:* Name and latest status* Connection* Links to external services* Co-workers contacts

Worklog Feature

The worklog feature sounds like something a project manager would love. It enables users to track their tasks and project steps publicly in a micro-blogging format.

Bookmarklet Tool

Even if not logged into the Socialcast network, employees can use the bookmarklet tool to share status updates and website links while browsing the internet.

Suggested Company Directory

If you want to know who shares your interests, you can locate them using the suggested company directory features. It will find other employees with common interests based on community contributions and interactions.

Corporate Social Networking with Socialcast

The whole concept of corporate social networking has been a huge topic of discussion lately. Walking through a demo of the site shows this solution is relatively straightforward to use, although we couldn't find the newest functionality to grab some shots for you. The solution does appear to be very similar to many other SaaS social networking solutions, so it's difficult to see the differentiator for Socialcast. They have however, won awards such as the software2008 Innovation Showcase Winner and are listed as one of the KMWorld 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management 2008