Socialcast is a powerful activity stream engine for the enterprise. It brings social networking capabilities to corporate environments by enabling socialization, collaboration, and sharing of common business ideas to IT departments. Social networking can be an effective way of sharing relevant news in the IT industry, asking for advice when working on an issue for a business partner or customer, and staying connected with your colleagues that are dispersed around the country in today’s global workforce.
Socialcast was founded in 2005 by Timothy Young, and was recently purchased by VMware last year. It provides a free and a premium social networking portal that is very functional and simple to setup. Here are some of the product highlights.
The first thing you need to do is sign-up for the service with a valid business e-mail address. It needs to be a business e-mail address (Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo e-mail addresses won’t work). My wife is part of a local mom’s club, I thought the tool would be fantastic for collaboration of activities and sharing ideas for their club, unfortunately they are not a valid business and couldn’t register for Socialcast.
After you register your business e-mail you open up to a functional social networking site. You can invite your colleagues by entering their e-mail address, they will receive an invitation to join your social network website. Of course, you want to give your site a little "pizazz", to become the Admin of the site you need to register it by providing a credit card to validate your information. Your credit card is not charged, it is used to prove your identity.
The Dashboard provides you with a lot of useful information like the number of logins, the number of invitations, profile photos, number of connections made, and types of files shared.
Subsequently you are going to want to setup your own profile. To get to your settings click on your name in the right corner and select Settings. You can fill out your profile information including name, title, phone numbers, and collaboration accounts.
You can also add in personal interest information to share with your colleagues.
Socialcast really is an impressive tool for the enterprise. You can use the web portal or download the mobile application for the iPhone or Andriod. I recommend you check it out!
