Earlier this week, Socialtext released Socialtext 5.0, the next edition of its enterprise collaboration platform.

Key features:
– A visual dashboard to provide the starting page for the “social intranet,” with customization and tailoring options for the individual.
– Profile pages for people that describe skills and interests, and provide links to contact information.
– An enhanced way of creating content. The old days of hand-coded wiki markup are gone.
– A new idea, the SocialRadar, for highlighting people with similarities (on various criteria) to you. Collaboration Auto-Discovery is Pillar 7 of the 7 Pillars framework, and this plays well into what I seeing as being necessary for effective enterprise collaboration.
– Task management has taken a step-wise improvement too – with new capabilities like form-based creation of tasks.
– Access from mobile devices – a critical part of collaboration (see Pillar 2, Location Independence).

Well done to the Socialtext team. These are good, solid improvements – with some first class ideas coming to the foreground.