Open Text Corporation has announced an expanded family of social media offerings for businesses.

"With its more than 500 million members, Facebook, along with social sites like Wikipedia and Twitter, have brought social media into the mainstream," said James Latham, Chief Marketing Officer at Open Text.
"We are focused on helping customers realise practical and measurable business benefits such as faster time to market, higher customer retention or greater team productivity, while helping to reduce compliance, security and privacy risks."

Formerly Vignette Community Applications and Services, Open Text Social Communities is an enterprise social media product to allow organisations to engage with their customers, employees, and partners.
The latest release support rapid creation of socially enabled websites along with social microsites that combine Web 2.0 functionality, with analytics and social search. Now part of Open Text ECM Suite, Open Text Social Communities consolidates social applications, such as video galleries, photo galleries, slide shows, comments, ratings, forums, blogs, wikis, download management, event management, and idea management with user profiles, microblogging, social bookmarking, and group and moderation support.

Open Text Social Workplace has been updated to offer deeper integration with the Open Text ECM Suite and Open Text eDOCs, as well as new microblogging and instant messaging features.

A new enhancement to Open Text Content Server, called Pulse , provides a people-centric view into the activity occurring within the system. By socially enabling existing Content Server deployments, Pulse allows users to easily discover and collaborate on new content and share status updates, while continuing to use access controls, auditing, and other capabilities in their document management and compliance solutions.

It provides a Facebook-like social media environment within an existing Open Text ECM Suite deployment and moves informal communications out of email, to reduce dependence on slow email chains. Pulse is being made available as a free download.