Today, Socialcast announced the availability of Socialcast Reach, an extension to its core Socialcast enterprise activity streams and microblogging platform. Reach enables in-context views of relevant conversation streams across business systems such as SharePoint, Intranets, ERP, and CRM systems, providing cross-functional visibility into an organization’s key interactions.

While we hear a great deal of hyperbole about Enterprise 2.0 and social applications for business, Socialcast’s CEO and founder Tim Young, points out that, “If business is so social, you have to wonder why adoption rates for E2.0 software aren’t much greater.” He says that in his experience, there are a couple of reasons for the lag in adoption of social technologies inside organizations. “First, it’s not clear to employees what they should share at work,” according to Young, so it follows that integrating the sharing activity into natural workflow will help guide them as to what is useful in that context.

However, he believes that “the main issue is that employees don’t want to learn a new application, they stick with applications they are familiar with and E2.0 vendors expect users to change their behavior and shift context to work in their system.” Reach combats that challenge by bringing relevant conversations and information into the systems where employees are the most comfortable and productive. According to Young, Reach “give large enterprises a platform to enhance the central nervous system for their company.” He says, “Reach is an enterprise platform for real-time communication, Facebook, or Twitter-stream style communication.”

Available in HTML/Javascript, and SharePoint Webparts, Reach has integrated Facebook’s open graph protocol so that when you comment on something on a given page, all the metatdata from the stream comes with it. Despite making comparisons to Facebook, Young emphasizes that “there’s a big difference between what we do and what Facebook does. There’s a parallel in terms of functionality, but huge differences from a security perspective.”

Reach can be deployed in the cloud or behind a company’s firewall. Young says, “To use the platform, you have to be authenticated against a company’s LDAP or Single Sign on. The beauty of this system is that because these streams live within an application, if an employee doesn’t have access to an area, they will not be able to see the activity going on around that lead. We basically inherit the rules and permission the organization has already put into its systems.”

The Socialcast Reach offering consists of extensions that fit into existing business systems.  Examples of these extensions include: Reach Stream, which brings conversation Streams into the enterprise application by integrating them into any business system environment that supports HTML/Javascript. The Reach Discussion extension allows users to focus discussions around key resources within a business system environment to discuss issues around such things as CRM accounts, leads, problem tracking, and project management. The Reach Recommend extension creates a view into the critical connections of employees as they search for and leverage content across the enterprise. 

Key to Socialcast Reach is its integration into systems where employees already work every day. According to Young, “That kind of simple integration is what we are bringing to the enterprise reach so employees can interact in real time. The beauty is that it is all tied back to the common Socialcast platform. All users stay synced up no matter where they are, in an application at the home office or via mobile alerts.”

As Young says, “Customers recognize that they need to be more agile and more attuned to real time communication and information, but they don’t have the time to train an entire enterprise on a new tool that isn’t already part of their workflow.” With Reach, Socialcast hopes to extend the reach of social into all corners of enterprise workflow.