Socialcast Adds Integrated Social Task Management

Today SocialCast by VMware announced the new version of their enterprise social networking platform. The main new feature of this release is the integration of Social Task Management, which they are calling Socialcast Projects. As you know, I've been preaching about the benefits of Social Task Management for quite some time, so clearly I am happy to see Socialcast provide this new element to their product. With this new enhancement people using Socialcast will be able to more easily to organise, manage, share and complete the work they are doing.

Screenshot of the latest release




Things to consider:

1) While the addition of project management features is a welcome enhancement, it is not unique to Socialcast. Other enterprise social networks/collaboration platforms such as Atlassian, Jive (via the acquisition of Producteev), IBM Connections, Podio and many others also offer similar features.
2) Socialcast is not new to the Social Task Management space. In Sep of 2011 Socialcast introduced Strides, a stand-alone social task management service that was not integrated with Socialcast. The new Socialcast Projects is not the integration of Strides, but rather a rewrite from the ground up using the lessons they have learned during the time they have been developing Strides. The future of Strides is unclear at the moment, but my assumption is VMware will not continue to actively develop both platforms. I expect Strides customers to be upsold to Socialcast with it's more robust social networking features. Hopefully when this occurs VMware will provide a smooth migration path from Strides to Socialcast Projects.

Video of Socialcast, including Projects




VMware is better known to most IT professionals as a backend infrastructure company that specialises in server and desktop virtualization. However, over the last few years VMWare has attempted to get more into the end-user computing slide of things, acquiring SocialCast, Zimbra (email) and SlideRocket, the later of which they recently sold to ClearSlide. Zimbra has never really taken off as a large enterprise alternative to Microsoft Exchange or IBM Notes/Domino, but it does have some interesting features such as integrated unified communication, calendar and scheduling and Zimlets. Zimlets are small applications which offer integration into a variety of different systems, for example mapping an address or looking up the status of a package delivery. I'd like to see VMware integrate the calendar and Zimlet features into SocialCast.

This new release will be a welcome one for Socialcast customers, and provides some competitive differentiation versus other stand-alone enterprise social networking vendors.