VMware announced the immediate availability of the latest version of Socialcast by VMware that introduces new capabilities such as integrated project management and secure instant messaging to help increase employee productivity, community engagement and business performance.

The new Socialcast addresses the challenge of managing and accessing information trapped in silos by consolidating all activities associated with the daily flow of work into a single location with an intuitive interface that is accessible from any device.

Socialcast users can now tap into activity streams, messages, private chats, projects and tasks to efficiently complete assignments to drive business outcomes.

“Although we were named a leader in IDC’s latest MarketScape report 1, we have not stopped innovating and are committed to delivering on our core promise of helping customers use social tools and practices to discover a better way to work,” said Tim Young, VP, social enterprise, End-User Computing, VMware. “We continue to advance the product with new capabilities to ensure we deliver the most value to our customers.”

For companies in today’s knowledge economy, competitive advantage is achieved by tapping deeper into the passions, imaginations and ingenuity of employees. Socialcast is the enterprise social networking platform that connects people, conversations and projects in one place to improve communication and collaboration to achieve better results, faster.

A recent study of Socialcast end users revealed that 67 percent of community members found Socialcast helps them get answers to their questions faster and 81 percent indicated that being part of their employer’s Socialcast community makes them feel more connected to the company 2.

Unlike traditional communication and collaboration tools such as email, spreadsheets and intranets, Socialcast eliminates the multiple inboxes and information silos that stifle ideas and drain productivity. By giving employees modern ways to discover and connect, and by integrating social capabilities into the business systems people use every day, Socialcast helps unlock the flow of ideas and innovation across the organization to achieve untapped levels of performance.

New capabilities in Socialcast include:

- Integrated Project Management – With the introduction of Projects, Socialcast integrates project management and activity tracking, providing a single place for the day-to-day flow of work that now spans multiple systems. Socialcast Projects allows teams to track project deliverables, action items and due dates without spreadsheets, emails or status meetings.

- Secure Real-Time Messaging From Anywhere – Socialcast Messenger is a free mobile application companion to Socialcast Private Message that allows users to have ad-hoc conversations with individuals or teams, as well as share files and photos from the road, along with location information. Socialcast Messenger stays synchronized with Socialcast so all work-related communications are in one place.

- Enhanced Community Management – An improved command and control interface for community administrators allows the configuration and customization of communities to fit the unique requirements of their culture. Management of security, employee access, integration with other business systems, auditing and reporting are all centralized.

The latest version of Socialcast is available immediately as an on-premise or SaaS solution.