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It has taken some time but it was worth waiting: The Social Software Matrix has grown up and now comes with a brand new design! Two years after the inital launch we thought is was time to move on and ahead. Our goal was to make the website easier to read, browse and navigate. We hope you agree it has gotten a little sexier too

The Facelift however is just the starting point of a series of improvements we have put on our agenda for 2012. We will optimize the concept of the Social Software Matrix to the information needs of corporate decision makers who are ready to go Enterprise 2.0 and willing to empower their workforce with social software. The core is and will be the comparison of social software in key business use cases. Around that we will reorganize some of the contents, redefining categories and extending the publication of the insights we’ve gained from years of experience with social software in the workplace.

So stay tuned and remember:

Neo: What is the future of the Social Software Matrix?
Trinity: The answer is out there, Neo, and it’s looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.

The Social Software Matrix Team

Acquia’s Drupal Commons is a free social business suite, which is based on the powerful content management framework Drupal. As it is pushed by a big open source community and used by certain big players, we now present our evaluation of Acquia Commons rev2.3

We have a new member in the matrix! Drupal Commons was a long term member in our rising vendors section. Due to Drupals progress in market penetration as a web content management system and the possibilities of the framework we decided to add it to the matrix. Highlights are the absence of licence fees and the high flexibility of the product.

We reviewed the actual version of Socialtext and updated our evaluation. Not too many differences occured, but the tool is still a strong solution for wiki-based use-cases.

Since a few days the new Confluence 4.0 is out! For wiki based use cases it seems to be a very good solution. Atlassian improved the editor in usability, design and functionality. Moreover, the macros now feel much more like an app-store. See our evaluation of Confluence for more details.

Please find our updated evaluation of Jive in the matrix. With Jive 5.0 the new user interface is even more usable and we are amazed about the activity stream functionalities, where Jive sets a new standard. Find out more in our analysis of Jive at the tools section.

It has been a while since our last review. But the new blueKiwi version comes with a lot of improvements and emphases communication. The tool focusses on the activity stream – therefore its strengh lies in enterprise communication, expert search and social networking.

It took us some time to test und review the version 3.0 of Lotus Connections but finally we made it and published our results.

The release of the 3.0 version of Lotus Connections in November 2010 was a further step in the strengthening of IBM’s position in the social software market. By including social analytics, simplifying the mobile access for users, optimizing the usability, extending the communities and forum functions and adding new compliance and auditing features IBM further improves and completes its social business suite.

Please let us know what you think about the 3.0 version of Lotus Connections and what experiences you have made with it.

The Social Software Matrix – Rising Vendors is the latest section of the Social Software Matrix and now available under: http://socialsoftwarematrix.org/rising_vendors/.

This new area within the social software matrix allows each provider of a social software application to present themselves and their product. In contrast to the Social Software Matrix valued tools (see here), suppliers can put their products into the evaluation tool and provide a huge number of prospective customers with access their portfolio. (more…)