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New: Drupal Commons 2.3 added to the Social Software Matrix

We have a new member in the matrix! Drupal Commons was a long term member in our rising vendors section. Due to Drupals progress in market penetration as a web content management system and the possibilities of the framework we decided to add it to the matrix. Highlights are the absence of licence fees and the high flexibility of the product.

Socialtext 4.7.5

We reviewed the actual version of Socialtext and updated our evaluation. Not too many differences occured, but the tool is still a strong solution for wiki-based use-cases.

Confluence 4.0

Since a few days the new Confluence 4.0 is out! For wiki based use cases it seems to be a very good solution. Atlassian improved the editor in usability, design and functionality. Moreover, the macros now feel much more like an app-store. See our evaluation of Confluence for more details.

Jive 5.0

Please find our updated evaluation of Jive in the matrix. With Jive 5.0 the new user interface is even more usable and we are amazed about the activity stream functionalities, where Jive sets a new standard. Find out more in our analysis of Jive at the tools section.

BlueKiwi 10.5 (2011) updated

It has been a while since our last review. But the new blueKiwi version comes with a lot of improvements and emphases communication. The tool focusses on the activity stream – therefore its strengh lies in enterprise communication, expert search and social networking.

Evaluation of Lotus Connections updated

It took us some time to test und review the version 3.0 of Lotus Connections but finally we made it and published our results.

The release of the 3.0 version of Lotus Connections in November 2010 was a further step in the strengthening of IBM’s position in the social software market. By including social analytics, simplifying the mobile access for users, optimizing the usability, extending the communities and forum functions and adding new compliance and auditing features IBM further improves and completes its social business suite.

NEW! Rising Vendors now within the Social Software Matrix

The Social Software Matrix – Rising Vendors is the latest section of the Social Software Matrix and now available under: http://socialsoftwarematrix.org/rising_vendors/. This new area within the social software matrix allows each provider of a social software application to present themselves and their product. In contrast to the Social Software Matrix valued tools, suppliers can put their products into the evaluation tool and allow a huge number of prospective customers access their portfolio.

Announcing a partnership with The 2.0 Adoption Council

We are happy to announce a partnership with The 2.0 Adoption Council.

This partnership is a great step as it combines the approach of comparing social software in business relevant categories with a group of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners. In fact this can be considered a paradigm shift as the partnership marks the first attempt to assess social software from a purely practitioner-based perspective, unbiased by vendor or consultancy influence and interests.

Case Study: One Year of Social Intranet

A major part of our Social Media perception is the direct result of our experiences with our own Social Intranet. It is based on Atlassian’s enterprise wiki Confluence and internally known as the “Teamweb”. The Teamweb is now a little more than one year old and with some delay to the celebrations I want to describe our experiences and insights from this year.

MindTouch 2009 Enterprise added to the matrix

After a month of testing and reviewing MindTouch 2009 Enterprise we have now published our results and officially added it to the Social Software Matrix.

MindTouch is a very interesting social software solution which differentiates itself from competing products. In contrast to most other social software vendors which focus on increased pre-packaging and more out of the box functionality, the strategy of MindTouch is to enhance their wiki-based collaboration platform as an integration point of existing enterprise applications and the related information silos. The platform has a web-oriented architecture and operates on clean XHTML to provide the best integration conditions. Instead of reinventing the wheel by providing all social software functionality out of the box, MindTouch enables customers to integrate specialized social software (i.e. for blogs: WordPress) on the platform and extend its’ capabilities with other web-services. In addition to that the Deki script language allows users to create powerful templates and data-mashups.