Social Collaboration software has become a necessity in just about any type of company, so using it on a daily basis is very important as it allows teams and communities to work together in order to get the best results. The most important thing about social software solutions is that they aren’t static, instead they can be modified to the needs of any company, an astonishing thing to say the least.
Companies, external customers, partners and suppliers are using this type of solutions, and thanks to them they can work better. This type of software makes communication a lot easier within a company, not to mention that it also brings a whole new meaning to the collaboration between teams.
Gartner Magic Quadrant: Social Collaboration Software for Enterprises
There are numerous benefits that come from using such solutions, and these are things such as mining networks, making it easy to discuss and comment on the work, discovering other people that share similar interests, alerting users about relevant information and, what’s the most important thing, creating teams and communities that work together in order to provide the best results.
Each of the apps in this field of work come with their own strengths and weaknesses, things that we are going to share with you for each product. Here are some solutions we wanted to highlight:
Acquia
This is an open source approach when it comes to social software, and it’s a small product, suitable for fast growing organizations. As an upside, it has a great ecosystem, a good Drupal based expertise and a suitable focus on strategy. Some cautions need to be taken when it comes to the customer experience which can be a little rough with Acquia, the viability and focus that aren’t greatly defined at least for the time being.
Atlassian
This is a very useful product that is continually updated and it’s thought as being an authority. The Atlassian solution has all the necessary functionality that you might need and its main focus is on creating a stellar customer experience that just cannot be received elsewhere. Most of the time, this solution can be found in IT departments, as others fail to use it properly. When it comes to strategy, the tool focuses on a single department and once that is done it expands the focus to other products.
Google
Google has a great, cloud based vision for the social software, as it offers all the necessities of a company in the online world. This makes the company an innovation expert that brings great solutions focused on creating stellar strategies with stunning results. The downside is that the support can be a little rough sometimes and the architecture of the business apps can be hard to customize.
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Huddle
This product by Huddle is suitable for the niche companies, and it focuses most of the time on the way companies collaborate with each other both at an internal and external level. It also places a major focus on innovation and the cloud based experiences, but sometimes it does lack functionality and it can be hard to integrate it with other solutions in order to make a more fluid workflow.
IBM
IBM can be found in the Leaders quadrant and it has continually provided impressive social software solutions that are viable even today and still manage to implement some of the best strategies in the market. Thanks to abilities such as cloud deployment, mobile transfers and so on, this is one of the best solutions on the market right now.
Igloo
Suitable for niche players, this offers a great customer experience as well as a stellar functionality. However, this solution by Igloo loses some points due to the fact that it doesn’t offer a viable long term strategy that will work in the long run.
Jive
Jive is a leader on the market since it provides social and collaboration capabilities, it has a stellar customer experience, great functionality and a wonderful ecosystem to work in.
All in all, these are some of the best social software solutions. Each one of them can either be a challenger, leader, niche player or visionaries, but in the end it’s all about the functionality that they offer and how easy they are to use, as this makes them good or bad in this regard.
Photo credit: Jive / Gaurav Mishra / Oscar Berg
