ReadWriteWeb

It has been a busy year for VMware in terms of acquisitions. This followed an almost equally busy 2010, during which it bought both SpringSouce, incorporating its technology into vFabric, and Zimbra from Yahoo, which it has kept separate.

Most of the 2011 buys we have covered in various posts here, but a few escaped our attention. I thought it would be a nice year-end post to review where things stand with each technology. By comparison, Google this past year acquired more than two dozen companies.

I work on a small creative team in Human Resources at Humana, and we're lucky to have access to useful tools and the permission to autonomously scope out and prototype small ad-hoc projects. So last year, when our company began to learn about the Socialcast API, it wasn't long before we started to think of ways to use the discussion data to help build and strengthen our internal community.

There were three main things that we focused on as people began to discover and use the platform:

1. How to help people measure and monitor their level of participation,
2. How to reward people for using the social features correctly, and
3. How to help drive adoption and spread the word about the service.

Today Socialcast has announced the beta of Strides, its first big launch since VMware acquired them earlier this summer. Just connecting everyone on an internal social network isn't enough - everyone has to actually use the network for their work activities. And Strides is bringing a lightweight Web 2.0 form of project management, layering it on top of the social networking tool.

Inmagic is launching an idea management system called IdeaNet this week, claiming to deliver the "right mix of culture, process, and tools to support open and fluid lines of communication across organizational communities and silos." That's quite a mouthful, not to mention a lot of Big Ideas right there.

We've always liked Socialcast here at ReadWriteWeb, but until it's been lacking a major feature: the ability to invite external collaborators. While some companies - such as Huddle, Simplybox and newcomer Podio - have made external collaboration a key point, many major vendors have lagged in this area. So we're glad to see external collaboration become a focus for Socialcast, which announced today a few new features.

What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a new service called GreenRope, available now.

This is a Swiss Army Knife of the Web. There are more tools here than you can possibly review in a short article, and the idea is to put in one place everything you need to get started online.

The enterprise microblogging and discussion marketplace continues to evolve, as this week TheFlowr.com announced new features and pricing. As we have covered in the past, Socialcast has been acquired by VMware, Yammer has partnered with Netsuite, and a number of traditional enterprise vendors are putting forth their own offerings in this market too.

VMware announced today that it will acquire Socialcast, an enterprise microblogging and social network software-as-a-service. The move expands VMware's software-as-a-service portfolio, which also includes Zimbra, Mozy and SlideRocket. VMware is owned by EMC.

Convofy, the new enterprise collaboration platform we covered last month, opens to the public today. It's launching using a freemium model similar to Yammer's, so you can try it out for free.

We got a demo from CEO Faizan Buzdar yesterday, and it's a solid product. It's unique, fast and has clear value for teams collaborating with visual media such as photos, video or data visualizations. It has a few discrete apps that run on its platform already, including an image gallery and media player. Users can comment on specific elements of an image, website or video. A nice touch is the ability to comment on a portion of a video and create a link that will start the video at the relevant point.

Like any other social network, the value of an enterprise social network is tied to the number of active users. In general, the more users the more value - more knowledge shared, more questions answered and more connections made. In this case, does the per-user pricing model of many enterprise social software tools make sense? Enterprise microblogging provider Socialcast doesn't think so, and today the company announced a new pricing plan to deal with that fact.

"Our most successful deployments are those that are enterprise-wide and boasting the largest, most comprehensive internal networks," Socialcast CEO Tim Young writes. "As more people join the network, greater value is created - with every new member that joins comes another potential answer, knowledge source, and idea."