Boston – January 28, 2010 – OutStart, a leader in social business software and learning systems, announced the availability of OutStart Participate 2010, the latest release of its social software for business. Participate 2010 is a proven, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that supports popular social media models and rich collaboration in a secure, management environment. The 2010 release provides enterprises with new workspaces, enhanced social networking and additional Web 2.0 and mobile features to enable employees and customers to share and find the information they need, while offering the benefits of SaaS. The result: a better user experience, quicker deployment, broader adoption, and more effective collaboration and continuous learning across the enterprise.
Organizations such as CVS Caremark, DIRECTV and TiVo rely on Participate to power their customer communities and tap into the collective intelligence of their employees and extended enterprise. Participate is ideal for a range of business functions such as sales enablement, customer support, professional services delivery, and training and development. Participate helps users collaborate with their peers and share insights on virtually any channel, and is one of the first solutions to seamlessly link social and traditional communications, and support both internal and external communities. The new release also extends support for mobile clients, and is optimized for Web browsers on iPhone and Blackberry devices.
Participate 2010 Release Highlights:
New Workspaces – Participate 2010 offers new workspaces where users can gather a virtual team of experts to collaborate on a specific project or task via discussions and knowledge-sharing. Conversations and content-sharing are truly “multi-channel” in Participate, with support for instant messaging, media-sharing, Wikis, forums, and blogs, as well as Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and email via plug-ins.
Enhanced Social Networking – To enable enhanced social networking, Participate 2010 also helps the community spotlight contributors through virtual business cards and detailed member profiles, personal status options, the ability to create a “wall” of activity and receive updates through email notification, and multiple ways to search and browse for expertise. Participate allows you to offer many of the features that make public social networking sites like Facebook popular, with the security and control of a true enterprise-friendly platform.
Personalized UI with Web 2.0 – Ease-of-use and rich functionality is critical to keeping users engaged, so Participate 2010 also offers a redesigned user interface, search enhancements, an update to its forums, new personalized interfaces with convenient access to personal status, subscriptions, tasks, contacts, and private message updates, as well as more UI options featuring additional Web 2.0 features like Wiki Rich Text Editing and auto-complete suggestions in search and address fields.
Executive Quotes
“Participate has been the choice of enterprises who want a practical, proven solution for tapping into the power of collaboration and communities,” said Massood Zarrabian, president and CEO of OutStart. “This new release offers new workspaces and social networking capabilities, which enhance the user experience and help businesses drive more widespread collaboration and continuous learning.”
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About OutStart
At OutStart, we’re out to solve a big problem. Most organisations posses a wealth of underutilised collective intelligence around their products, services and processes. This underutilisation negatively impacts employees, customers and partners, costing precious time and money while hindering performance. Said simply, “what your people don’t know will hurt you.” OutStart’s social business software and learning systems act like a lifeline: connecting people to the know-how, creativity and learning they require to be efficient, effective and agile.
Since its inception in 1999, and backed by leading venture capital firms, OutStart has matured into a profitable and rapidly growing company with an impressive range of customers who are surpassing expectations and delivering exceptional business results. The company is honored to have customers like Autodesk, BB&T, Boeing Company, BT, CVS Caremark, DIRECTV, EDS, General Dynamics, Internal Revenue Service, Lufthansa, McDonald’s, MetLife, Prudential, TiVo, Australian Defence Force, U.S. Navy, UK Ministry of Defence, Verizon Wireless and Yum! Brands.
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