Neudesic Seeks to Expand Social Enterprise with Pulse 1.2, Including New Idea Sharing Function

Microsoft partner Neudesic has released Pulse 1.2, the newest version of its social enterprise connector software.  The new release adds a hosted option, support for Windows Live ID authentication, as well as a new feature Neudesic calls IQ. 

According to John Vogeley, Neudesic’s vice president of sales and marketing,  IQ is “a cross between an ideation engine and a Q&A area.”    Much like popular Q&A sites like the StackExchange sites or Yahoo Answers, IQ is designed to help identify experts in different topic areas inside the organization based on their contributed answers to their co-workers’ questions from a variety of interfaces including mobile, browser, or embedded in applications like Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Neudesic entered the social enterprise market with Pulse in November 2010, partly in response to Salesforce.com’s Chatter.  At its core, Pulse provides integrated activity streams for a company’s enterprise systems that employees – and now people outside of the organization like vendors - can subscribe to for visibility into the company’s latest data and activity.

Unlike other social enterprise solutions like Sonoma Partners’ Vibe and Salesforce.com’s Chatter that tend to centralize around the CRM system, Pulse positions itself as a standalone hub that supports microblogging and integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, but has been built with the intent of bringing more awareness to an enterprise’s people through the systems that drive its business.