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Commercial wiki vendor Socialtext has created what it calls a Facebook for the enterprise.

The company says that two new tools, Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People, reconceptualize the wiki by enabling people to gain insight by managing their information, conversations, and connections.

How are these tools like Facebook? Socialtext says that by watching how wikis function in corporate environments you see how quickly people not only put content in, but start having conversations that evolve into rich web content via co-editing, linking, and tagging.

As this content grows, the knowledge, expertise, and relationships of the people contributing to this web becomes apparent through their contributions and interactions.

Socialtext also launched four core solution areas: Business Social Networks, Collaborative Intelligence, Flexible Client Collaboration, and Participatory Knowledgebase. The business social software launch is part of a new direction for the company, in the works since CEO Eugene Lee took the helm five months ago.

These solutions products are in high demand with an increasing number of organizations looking to transform their business through social software, the company said.

"Wikis are the foundation for business social software, and we are building the rest of the house," Lee said. "It starts with Socialtext People to make it easier, if not fun, to discover expertise. The Dashboard lets individuals customize their view of information and conversations. When combined with our four core solution areas, businesses not only realize productivity gains, but insight from their employees, customers, and business partners."

Collaborative wikis are an emerging trend for businesses. Forrester Research predicts that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will reach $4.6 billion globally by 2013. According to a recent Forrester report: "In 2008, firms will look to invest in the most well established Web 2.0 tools -- namely, wikis, blogs, and RSS."

Here are some of the features of the new tools:

Socialtext Dashboard

Personalized and customizable dashboards of internal and external social software activity.

Enterprise-class and standards-based widgets, that users can generate, customize and assemble with a drag-and-drop user experience.

Starting with Dashboard Templates for the Four Solution Areas, users, or central administrators, can create and deploy dashboards for groups. Socialtext Dashboard supports third party widgets, and the OpenSocial gadget standard.

Socialtext 3.0 also provides significant enhancements to its open APIs for enterprise integration

Socialtext People

Throughout the Socialtext wiki, profiles are made visible so at any time you can pivot to the people behind the content.

Profiles and a user directory make it easy for colleagues to introduce themselves and discover implicit and explicit expertise.

People can subscribe to the activity of colleagues. Groupings enable users to declare interest and expertise on their profile and other users profiles, making group forming as simple as adding a tag.

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