Learning software vendor Saba goes social

The Saba Live platform combines Web collaboration with updates, profiles and content sharing

Saba, a provider of training and online collaboration software to large companies and institutions, is adding an enterprise social-networking platform that will let employees share links and content, then go right into an online conference about them.

Saba Live, set to be unveiled Monday at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, is designed to bring elements of the Facebook and Twitter experiences into work life, but with some features especially for enterprises. For one thing, it will be available both as on-demand software in the cloud and for deployment behind a firewall.

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Saba, a provider of training and online collaboration software to large companies and institutions, is adding an enterprise social-networking platform that will let employees share links and content, then go right into an online conference about them.

Saba Live, set to be unveiled Monday at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, is designed to bring elements of the Facebook and Twitter experiences into work life, but with some features especially for enterprises. For one thing, it will be available both as on-demand software in the cloud and for deployment behind a firewall.

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A growing number of employees are bringing social-networking skills and expectations into their jobs, industry analysts say, and some marquee names in IT want to help enterprises take advantage of that trend. Cisco Systems said last week that its Quad platform, which will let employees post status updates, form communities, post videos and engage in other actions such as instant messaging, will ship before November.

Saba is going after much the same opportunity from a different origin. The company has offered online training since its founding in 1997 and acquired Web-based conferencing company Centra about three years ago. Though the 625-person company in Redwood City, California, lacks Cisco's size, it has about 1,300 customers, including BMW, McDonald's and the U.S. Army. A key advantage of Saba Live will be its tight integration into Saba Centra, said Milind Pansare, a senior director of product marketing at Saba.

Users of Saba Live will be able to "follow" anyone within their organizations, viewing files, comments and other content that they post in the platform. At the same time, users will be able to select who can see each item they put up. Commenting and rating features will help to tease out the best ideas and the most common concerns in the organizations, such as product bug warnings. Saba Live will also include a search function for finding fellow employees who are knowledgeable or experienced in a certain area.

Employees will be able to form groups around particular tasks or interests, including "invisible" groups that non-members won't be able to see. That feature might be used to allow collaboration among executives involved in merger discussions, Pansare said.

Another feature makes Saba Live look a bit more like an enterprise tool and less like consumer social networking. Anyone with administrator credentials will be able to see all groups and even view a graphical representation of all the connections among employees based on whom they have as Saba Live contacts. Human resources executives, if they had such credentials, might use this capability in handling change management, Pansare said.

One of the key features of Saba Live is the flexibility to impose more or less corporate access and control over activity on the platform, said Nick Howe, vice president of learning and development at Hitachi Data Systems. The storage technology company in Santa Clara, California, has been testing a beta version of Saba Live for about three months. A subset of the company's 4,100 employees worldwide is now using it.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.