Private Twitter-like services - also known as microblogging - are now available for the enterprise in a new offering from Socialtext.
For those organizations that would like to offer these types of services to their users but wish to keep them behind the firewall, Socialtext offers a hosted (your rack or theirs) appliance option. The service costs $1 per user per month in addition to a monthly fee for the hardware (~$1k/mth).
According to the Socialtext website, the turn-key solution offers optional features for an additional fee like personal homepages and SocialCalc which offers dynamic, distributed 'social' spreadsheets. All accounts offer in-depth analytics and a fairly comprehensive set of integration options including: LDAP, Sharepoint, Lotus and REST API.
While there are other services like Yammer which offer similar enterprise-level services, they as of yet do not offer the level of control and flexibility that a rack-mounted appliance would for corporate IT environments.
It will be interesting to see how substantial the market is for the Socialtext approach of bundling hardware and software as a service versus the other purely service plays. Will the convenience of security and control overcome the cost differential as compared with less-expensive options?
If you've had an experience with Socialtext or with Yammer, please post your comments. We'd love to hear from you about this.
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