If Saba Software has its way, the enterprise collaboration space is about to get a lot more social. Saba’s upcoming collaboration platform People Cloud is currently being beta tested with about 100 firms. The company’s offering includes such social networking features as Facebook-like status updates and discussion threads. The product also includes group collaboration, web conferencing, and brainstorming capabilities to help businesses produce more effective collaboration results.The People Cloud will be offered in the cloud.

Facebooking the Business

Saba software wants to leverage the power of enterprise social networking. The company isn’t alone in this regard; Salesforce.com has Chatter in an attempt to get sales departments and support reps talking about the customers. Cisco and IBM are exploring the social media space from a multichannel perspective. Saba’s approach to enterprise social networking focuses on online training, learning management, and human resources. It is focusing its collaboration functionality on the way organizations recruit, train, and manage employees. This gives it a good start in populating social media profiles with useful information.

Saba’s CEO Bobby Yazdani has said of the company’s people focused process:

“What we’ve done very, very well is essentially going into these large organizations, helping them enable training and, capturing the ‘people profile’ as the first step to understanding who they are, and what they do, and how they are organized.”

Interactions between people are at the heart of a good social network. If Saba is able to leverage its expertise in this area, it could create a powerful tool of enterprise social networking.

The company’s beta People Cloud has Facebook like functionality in addition to more business focused collaborative features. The People Cloud, like Facebook, recommends people each person should connect to based on employee data. The platform also helps guide users in their professional development with recommended training. When users look through a specific group in People Cloud, they can invite initiate a Centra web conferencing meeting with the people in that group automatically invited.

Ben Willis, a senior director of Saba’s product strategy, highlights the value of their enterprise social network offering in talent identification:

“We can do a very narrow and targeted experts search, and that sets us apart lot of other social vendors out here. We’re not just relying on community identified expertise, through searching and tagging, but on real expertise like certification in a particular area.”

What do you think about Saba’s attempt to turn collaboration social? Is Web 2.0 and enterprise social networking going to become the new normal? How can an internally social business outperform traditional ones? Join the discussion and share your thoughts in the comments below.