Here is some potentially welcome news for any individual training departments out there (or small businesses) who have considered diving into enterprise social software for social and collaborative learning or otherwise, but have held off so far due to financial contraints. SocialText - a leading enterprise social software platform provider - just announced last week that they would now be offering fully SaaS access to their platform (up to 50 users) for free.  No strings attached.  Their hope is that giving away access at this level will let departments within organizations feel comfortable experimenting with their platform. When and if adoption catches on, it will be easier to prove a business case for either purchasing a larger SaaS account or transitioning to an on-premise appliance.

The version of the platform included with this offer is not stripped down feature-wise, although it is somewhat restricted.  Users have access to one wiki workspace including blogging tool, a portal-style dashboard, and SocialText's social networking and corporate micro-blogging (think Twitter) functionalities.  A paid version would add access to create unlimited wiki workspaces, access to SocialText's new social spreadsheet tool: SocialCalc, and - of course - tech support.   

In our reviews of their product, we've found it to be very compelling.  They certainly don't have the corporate user base of Atlassian's Confluence product, but they have still managed to create a name for themseves in the enterprise wiki space.  They have been very sucessful at putting a user-friendly face onto the underlying wiki technology.  We at Bersin & Associates have been slowly implementing a wiki as our intranet and collboration platform for a few months now.  And our experience so far has shown that bringing the real power of the wiki to the employee population at large while navigating around the learning curves assocaited with wiki notation and macros can be very challenging.  SocialText has tried to solve this issue by making as much of the functionality visually managed as possible.

Figure 1: Social Calc

Source: SocialText, 2009.

If this offer has you intrigued, and you think you just might start experimenting with blending social learning and collaboration into your programs, let us know.  We are always looking for additional tales from the field, and we might be able to help as well.

-David