A social hub for organizations

This week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston prompted product announcements from leading industry players including Jive Software and SocialText.

This is of interest to us here at Curverider as we believe that Elgg can have an impact in the enterprise space. Elgg started life 6 years ago as an internal collaboration tool in the education arena and moving forwards I see its core strength as bridging the worlds of internal and external collaboration for organizations.

Elgg provides a rich social layer, or hub, that provides socially-aware tools to aid collaboration internally, as well as enabling participation beyond the firewall with the wider social web.  Such two-way interaction is vital for organizations who want to use social technology to improve internal productivity, build their presence and brand externally and improve collaboration with suppliers and customers.

With elgg.com we are taking our first commercial steps into this market by offering a range of packages, from a powerful microblogging option right through to a customized enterprise solution.

We're under no illusion that there are some strong players in the field and that we have a lot of hard work ahead of us. However, given Elgg's heritage as a social platform, together with our ethos of openness, transparency and empathy with data ownership concerns, I believe we are well positioned to offer a compelling product into the mix.