Socialcast FREE FAQ
Socialcast is an enterprise social network. While offering familiar features found in personal social applications such as Facebook or LinkedIn, Socialcast is much more robust, and is designed for businesses that want to improve the exchange of ideas and information across teams, organizations, and locations.
Socialcast is updating our free offering. The new FREE is a full-featured version of Socialcast offered at no cost for communities with up to 50 members.
Socialcast allows for real-time communication and collaboration at work. At a basic level, participants post messages to the community, such as a status update, a progress report, or a question. Fellow participants can then reply or add comments to these posts. Posts can include links or attachments. These “conversations” combine to form an Activity Stream or “feed” for the organization. Activity Streams can be specific to groups, such as the “Sales” group, or the “Marketing Team” group, and can be designated as either public or private. The result is a continual read on what’s happening now in a company. Over time, Activity Streams become a vital archive of institutional knowledge that can be filtered or searched by relevant topic or member.
Socialcast FREE is for companies of all sizes that want to create a community as a pilot or simply use Socialcast as a way to communicate and collaborate.
Go to www.socialcast.com and enter your work email into the sign-up form. You can then invite up to 50 people to join your new community. You should also “claim admin” by clicking on the “claim admin” button in the upper right-hand corner of the application.
All Socialcast communities are private. The only people who will see your Socialcast FREE community are its members; those inside your company and any external contributors that you explicitly invite.
Socialcast is used in companies of all sizes in any number of ways. A few of the most common uses of an enterprise social network include:
- Sales: Sales teams use Socialcast to manage accounts more effectively, engage other departments such as finance, legal, and product management to close deals faster, stay on top of the competition, and collaborate more closely with marketing.
- Information Technology: For IT staff and help desks, Socialcast enables faster answers to technical questions.
- Human Resources: Socialcast enables HR teams to get new employees up to speed faster, increase employee engagement, improve learning and development, and create a dynamic knowledge base for all employees.
- Executive and Corporate Communications: Socialcast can improve organizational effectiveness by opening lines of communication and making it easier for employees to share ideas and find answers -- all of which results in higher productivity, agility, and innovation.
Socialcast provides numerous options for customizing your community. The community administrator (admin) establishes the experience members will have within their Socialcast community, and is responsible for the ongoing management and tracking of community activity.
The admin should be someone who is actively engaged in the community and who typically serves as the go-to” person for “how-to” questions. They monitor community use, and track community activity, among other functions. Though in larger companies this person is typically in IT, the administrator can be a project manager, an internal communications manager, or anyone with a combination of passion, communication skills, and some technical know-how.
Community administrators have special rights in terms of setting up the experience for community members. These include the ability to turn specific community features on/off, such as Thanks and user polls, and to assign different roles to members. For detailed information on administering a Socialcast community, review the “administrator” section on developers.socialcast.com.
The new FREE has more features than we previously offered. For example, we have added the ability to invite people external to the company into a private group, Thanks, user polls, and the capability to integrate with existing business applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, CRM, ERP, and other systems using Socialcast Reach. The new FREE is a full-featured version of Socialcast offered at no cost for communities with up to 50 members.
Yes, Socialcast FREE will replace the current FREE version for communities of up to 50 members. If you want to create a community with more than 50 users as a pilot or proof of concept, you will need to contact a Socialcast sales representative by calling #1-888.779.3220. If you have made the decision to purchase Socialcast, you can get a quote or, if you are interested in SaaS and want to pay by credit card, you can purchase a subscription from the VMware online store.
If you have 50 or fewer members in your community, you will automatically get all the features we are offering in the new Socialcast FREE, including administrative controls, the ability to add team members outside your company to your community, recognize employees with Thanks, and many others.
There is no time limit for Socialcast FREE. The community is free for up to 50 members.
If you have more than 50 members in your current free Socialcast community, you automatically get all the features we are offering in the new Socialcast FREE, including administrative controls, the ability to add team members outside your company to your community, recognize employees with Thanks, and many others. In addition, in order to ensure you are getting the most from this new offering, someone from the Socialcast team will be contacting you to understand your business goals and how we may be able to help you achieve them.
Socialcast FREE is for communities with up to 50 members. If you have more than 50 members, you can get a quote and a Socialcast sales representative will contact you, or if you are interested in SaaS and want to pay by credit card, you can purchase a subscription from the VMware online store. We are currently running a special promotion on the VMware online store, offering Socialcast as a SaaS subscription for $25/user/year.
No, there will be no advertisements within a Socialcast FREE community. We are offering a FREE community to provide companies with an easy way to experience the business benefits of using Socialcast.
Absolutely. Socialcast FREE communities are hosted in Tier 1 data centers that are SAS70 Type II compliant. All data is protected by 128-bit SSL encryption, NIDS, and transaction audit trails with automatic hourly backups.
Socialcast offers a number of resources you can access to resolve questions or issues with your FREE community. Check out www.socialcast.com for use cases, product information, and general information about the company or our products. You can access technical documentation on developers.socialcast.com for detailed information on how to set up and administer your Socialcast community, and troubleshooting problems. If you still have questions, you can access our Knowledge Base on www.vmware.com and select “Socialcast” in the product pull-down menu.
Yes, anyone who is a member, whether internal or external to your company, counts toward the 50-member limit.
If you decide to purchase a Socialcast subscription, your FREE account will be upgraded and all your members, content, and data will stay with it. You will also have the ability to add/delete members, delete content, change permissions, and make other changes at your discretion.
You can purchase Socialcast by contacting a sales representative by calling +1-888-779-3220. If you prefer, you can get a quote and a Socialcast sales representative will contact you, or if you are interested in SaaS and want to pay with a credit card, you can purchase Socialcast from the VMware online store.
If you decide to deactivate your community, we can delete your data at your request.
