Socialtext Reaches Out to Enterprise Data

Enterprise social software provider Socialtext unveiled the beta version of Socialtext Connect, a new application designed to retrieve and distribute critical data from enterprise solutions, at this week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.

Socialtext is positioning Connect as an open standards-based tool designed for surfacing critical events from enterprise applications and injecting them as streams into Socialtext’s social software platform. Socialtext says that its new solution eliminates the siloing of data, events and processes among users of individual enterprise applications.

Socialtext Connect, which works with both traditional on-site and remotely hosted cloud-based enterprise solutions, syndicates information streams from various enterprise systems and allows users to leverage them with the Socialtext platform. Socialtext says its platform creates an enterprise-wide “social layer” that spans all disparate access points of an enterprise.

The Socialtext Connect application is built on three core technical components. Connectors serve as bridges between enterprise applications and the Connect solution. Connectors use Socialtext's ReST API, and can be built to connect any application to Socialtext using a hosted, plug-in or enterprise architecture. Signals Annotations, based on the Twitter Annotations standard, take metadata from enterprise systems and integrate them with microblogging messages. And AppBots are bi-directional software agents that automatically write to specialized enterprise events and data.

Many distributed enterprises remain highly siloed in terms of sharing data among different applications and users. Social media offers a natural means of efficiently distributing data across a network, and the concept should be familiar to most users.

The Socialtext Connect beta program is currently open to developers, system integrators and ISVs.