The social messaging study driven by n:sight arrived at the next stage. During the last days we got the input from ESME , bluekiwi, Flowr and Communote. All of these vendors offer their solution as SaaS (software as a service) and server installation.

SaaS is a good option for small companies or testing with small groups. You just need an account and you can start. Bigger companies will switch to the server installation, when they will start running social messaging with the all employees.

I made the experience on my workshops that’s much better to show something than explain the features. SaaS can also be used to start with your group and present the result to your management afterwards. Especially, if you use an open source solution like ESME or if it’s a free offer for small groups available like bluekiwi, Communote and Flowr provides.

All solution provides several options to do status updates. I like especially the option to create polls offered by bluekiwi and Flowr. It’s a nice way to ask colleagues about their opinion.

Tagging is a very important function to organize the content. It’s needed for any Enterprise 2.0 application. All four solutions provide tagging for status updates. A useful function is auto suggestion related to tags like offered by bluekiwi, Flowr and Communote.

API and other interfaces as input for status updates are available by all solutions. So it will be easy to connect other systems. Communote provides a XMPP interface to connect messaging solutions like ICQ or Windows Live Messenger. So it’s easy to integrate chat which is used nowadays in a lot of companies.

I am looking forward to read the next input from other vendors. You will be able to read more details when the study will be ready in September.