This week, Socialtext announced the release of Socialtext 5.0, the latest version of its enterprise social software platform. Socialtext says the new version includes an improved interface design and a partnership with introNetworks to bring SocialRadar to the product--a new way of locating people inside the organization.

The goal of any enterprise social product is to provide a way to share and collaborate in a social network inside the enterprise, but a nice offshoot of that is the ability to share knowledge naturally through the networking process. What introNetworks does is provide a way to build a profile of who you are along with your interests and abilities. It then gives users the ability to find people who are like them using a patented pin chart technology.

By clicking on a pin close to you, you can find people who you might not know inside the organization whose interests are close to yours.

As you would expect, introNetworks is thrilled with the partnership, which CEO Mark Sylvester sees as an excellent match. "The marriage with the Socialtext 5.0 platform and the SocialRadar application will offer users a much enhanced experience to find the most relevant people to connect and collaborate with," Sylvester said.

But one of the big issues with 1990s knowledge management was it asked people to describe their knowledge, and that's what this approach appears to do too. That said, it could provide a powerful way to locate people, so long as people participate as part of building their Socialtext profiles.

Other new features include a page creator tool for creating new pages quickly, a theme creator for branding pages and a new content editor.

For more information:
- see the Socialtext press release

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