Today (June 29, 2010), social software provider Mzinga (http://www.mzinga.com/) announced the Summer 2010 release of OmniSocial. This enterprise-class product enables businesses to connect, interact, and share knowledge with their employees, customers, and partners from anywhere, at anytime. The company name comes from “mZinga,” a Zulu word meaning “the ring” but as a Swahili word it means “beehive” – both of which make sense when you look at Mzinga’s interest in social applications of technology and related analytics.
The OmniSocial platform now provides support for onboarding, communication and collaboration, learning and development, performance and career development, innovation, and recruitment and retention. It consists of 38 applications and several dozen widgets, and supports Facebook, mobile apps, and SharePoint. The overall strategy behind OmniSocial’s support for learning includes four elements, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The elements in OmniSocial supporting learning
The OmniSocial Summer 2010 release is a flexible, cloud-based model. The intent of the design is to support easy branding, configuration, and deployment to match users’ unique business needs in creating a seamless social experience. Deployment can be either as private or public community sites, or as integrated applications within existing Web environments. The new release also introduces greater interoperability with both public and private-label Web and business applications, multiple mobile apps, and enhanced analytics providing real-time access to key community performance metrics.
New features and functionality
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Cloud-based model
Mzinga OmniSocial capitalizes on the flexibility, scalability, and elasticity associated with a cloud-based model. Users should experience greater system accessibility and reliability, more seamless, automated system updates, and a lower total cost of ownership. Cloud deployments may be either public or private.
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Administrator control panel
Within the Web-based environment, the improved OmniSocial Control Panel provides a more intuitive administrator interface and new settings for managing multiple OmniSocial sites, user permissions, content, moderation, rich applications, and a library of widgets. Applications and widgets can be deployed in other Web environments and applications. This is within a new, self-service model that Mzinga says requires no technical assistance or support. Administrators can now also add zones, which are spaces within sites where groups of users can interact around specific topics or areas of interest and expertise, with access by user, by group, or open to all.
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OmniMobile iPhone and BlackBerry apps
Mzinga now offers iPhone and BlackBerry social mobile apps that can be configured to match a client’s brand and community user experience. Using OmniMobile, individuals can access and participate in their OmniSocial communities anytime, from anywhere.
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Greater interoperability with the Social Web and private-label applications
OmniSocial supports seamless integration with popular social Web applications. Users can share content between their OmniSocial sites and other sites in real time. Integrations include Facebook and Microsoft SharePoint.
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Enhanced analytics and dashboards
OmniSocial provides multiple analytics and dashboard capabilities to measure a broad range of community performance indicators. The new items include:
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User reputation
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Trending content reports
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Search word analysis
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Heat maps and multiple reporting views
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Summary
“Mzinga OmniSocial enables us to offer our clients leading edge social research communities that incorporate social networking, peer-to-peer user interactivity, and market research functionality. This has enabled us to develop a proprietary social research community product to help our customers drive innovation, engagement and collaboration that is second to none,” said Jeffrey Resnick, Global Managing Director, Innovation and Partnerships at Opinion Research Corporation (ORC).
“OmniSocial was designed to help businesses better connect and collaborate,” said Eve Sangenito, Vice President of Marketing at Mzinga. “By using OmniSocial to create a pervasive social ecosystem throughout their business, organizations can enable ongoing communication, collaboration, knowledge sharing, brand awareness, market research, peer support, and much more.”
OmniSocial is available now, with additional features scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2010.
