Ingeniux Corporation (http://www.ingeniux.com) has announced Cartella, an application for managing enterprise social content and online collaboration. Cartella is the first unified social content management application that integrates social networking, Web 2.0 tools, analytics and content management into a single solution. The application includes modules for managing documents, wikis, blogs, rich media and social networking at a feature-price balance not available in the market today. In addition, Cartella is the first commercial software product that leverages Microsoft ASP.NET MVC and represents a major leap forward for ASP.NET development.

"For social software to work in the enterprise, employees, partners, and customers have to be willing to participate. To collaborate across the network in a business environment, there needs to be a framework for sharing," said Geoffrey Bock, senior analyst for the Gilbane Group's Collaboration & Social Computing Practice. "For many companies, this forces a trade-off between IT control and end-user ease of use. Cartella solves this problem by ensuring IT best practices while making it easy to launch, moderate, and optimize communities for active participation."

Gap Between Social Software and Web Content Management
With the demand for social business software on the rise, many established Web CMS and Portal vendors have attempted to bolt social features onto their legacy applications. However, these solutions don't address the distinct technical and business requirements for managing the social Web. While many social software point products have emerged to fill the usability gap, they lack IT best practices for managing and controlling social content and do not address compliance and workflow processes. To bridge the gap, Ingeniux has developed Cartella which uses proven content management principles to manage and control social content, while also making it extremely easy for end-users.

"Granular permission, access control, workflow, and content management integration are critical for managing a dynamic and effective Website," said Danny McKeever, senior Web marketing manager at Workday, the leader in SaaS-based enterprise solutions for human resources and financial management. "Cartella provides these things out of the box, plus a host of intuitive social networking features like social profiles, tagging, commenting, ratings and membership management that makes it easy for our end-users and administrators."

Fast Time-to-Value for Business Social Software
Cartella can be white labeled as a stand-alone social content management platform for companies without existing Web CMS investments or injected into any Website using a simple Web services API. Organizations can be up and running with Cartella in a matter of days to deliver immediate business value.

"We've worked very closely with our existing customers to develop Cartella," said Jim Edmunds, CEO of Ingeniux. "Over the course of a 14-month pilot program they've helped us develop an application that fits the needs of business and IT as well as transforms the way that social content is managed. Just like Web content, documents, or records management, social content is first class business information. With Cartella there is now a solution for successfully managing social content in the enterprise."

Built on Microsoft ASP.NET MVC, Cartella makes it easy for .Net developers to customize existing Cartella business social software modules or build new modules and applications on top of the Cartella platform to meet their unique business requirements using commercial development tools and technologies they already know and trust. Microsoft .NET MVC also provides a streamlined implementation approach for Cartella similar to Microsoft SharePoint. Cartella-powered communities are rapidly developed using ASP.NET Master Pages and Web technologies like HTML and CSS. All content in Cartella is available through REST Web services, allowing social content to be "mashed" with other applications or accessed by any Website.