On Tuesday, Socialcast announced the release Socialcast Reach, a new extension that provides a way to share social information from Socialcast's Enterprise 2.0 applications with other enterprise applications.

According to Socialcast, Reach provides a way to bring the conversation inside the applications employees use most often without having to explicitly open Socialcast to do it. If it works smoothly, it's a big leap forward because it provides access to information employees need on the fly. Smoother integration across disparate enterprise applications is always a worthwhile goal.

Nikos Drakos, Research director at Gartner also sees this as big step forward for enterprise social information. "...We see today the beginning of another evolutionary step in business computing that aims to bridge the gap between end-user social computing and business applications."

He adds, "The value of blending social context with transactional context when it comes to getting things done is already recognized both by business application vendors as well as by social platform providers."

Reach consists of three modules: Reach Stream, Reach Discussion and Reach Recommend. Each one integrates a different Socialcast feature into the external applications.

Tim Young, CEO and founder of Socialcast says that Reach solves the problem of trying to get users to integrate yet another application into their lives by bringing it to them. "Reach solves the ‘not another application' problem within corporate work structures by providing a new paradigm where employees can collaborate in context within their existing workflows and applications," Young says.

You can see an example of Socialcast functionality built into SugarCRM in the shot to the left (click for a larger version). The Socialcast discussion is on the right side of the screen.

For more: 
- see the Socialcast press release

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