If you are in the market for an enterprise social networking tool and haven’t yet considered Yammer or Jive or Socialtext or the dozens of other competitors out there, there is a new version 3.0 of Neudesic Pulse that might be worthy for you. It will be announced next week at the Microsoft Convergence conference, and the reason is clear: they offer the best integration with a variety of Microsoft services to their social streams. (We noted that Yammer had SharePoint integration for more than two years here.)
Here is an example of how they work with TeamSite, so you can see notifications of your documents in your stream and still use the native TeamSite controls and menu ribbon too.
The idea is to establish an enterprise-wide social fabric that connects workers and enhances their ability to work together efficiently by sharing whatever tool each user is most comfortable with, at least in theory. Besides TeamSite, there are integrators with SharePoint and Dynamics CRM services too, so you can place activity streams inside their interfaces. There is also integration with Microsoft Lync, so you can send IMs from within Pulse. Pulse also has native apps on all three mobile platforms:
Android, Blackberry, and iOS.
What is intriguing about the product is that you can follow all sorts of things besides people in your activity stream, such as groups that are setup around specific topics, or even documents in your SharePoint repository. A few other social networking services have begun offering this flexibility, such as Yammer Files for example.
Pulse comes in both on-premises (with typical prices ranging from $8-$10,000 for a one time license with annual maintenance extra) and cloud versions. The private cloud version is $12 per user per month. One nicety is that there are no add-on costs for the various integration services.
