SocialText Wiki Adding SocialCalc

Breaking news from Dan Bricklin at E20 Boston today is that his SocialCalc development will be added to the SocialText enterprise wiki. SocialText is an enerprise based wiki solution that can be hosted either with SocialText or at the enterprise location that brings Web 2.0 and social media to business in the form of document collaboration, knowledge collaboration and a collaborative knowledge-base wiki, all in the form of a business social network concept.

That brief synopsis doesn't begin to touch on the full feature set of SocialText, currently being used by such businesses as Boston College, CondeNet, Epitaph Records, BASF, IKEA and more. Now the innovative company will be adding SocialCalc at the end of summer. SocialCalc is a creation with SocialText and Dan Bricklin. You may know the name Dan Bricklin as the co-creator of VisiCalc with Bob Frankston. VisiCalc eventually became the application we all now know as Lotus Notes.

How is this innovative in the Web 2.0 business space? It takes the simple concept of an enterprise wiki and adds spreadsheet capabilities to it. This will expand the possibilities for the business social wiki exponentially. From Bricklin himself regarding the addition of SocialCalc and its benefits:

"Traditionally, wikis have centered on paragraphs of text and have proven invaluable for dealing with information in that form," said Dan Bricklin. "I am thrilled at how we have been able to bring spreadsheet editing into the wiki environment. Business people get the familiar layout, formatting, and calculation functionality of a spreadsheet together with the organic multi-page building and sharing functionality of a wiki. The spreadsheet metaphor has proven to be one of the most popular ways to organize, analyze, and store a vast range of types of information. With the addition of SocialCalc, Socialtext now has an even more powerful tool to let groups develop and keep track of their important data and ideas."

This isn't an application that the average social web user will come in contact with on a daily basis, but for the company who needs to bring the social aspect of business to the enterprise, it is a valuable tool. Are their other social business tools like SocialText out there? Yes, there are a few, but many of them don't have the backing of an experienced voice in the industry like Bricklin. With his input this should be an interesting addition to the web 2.0 space for enterprise.