Eureka Streams Brings Social Networking to Enterprise

It wasn't too long ago that businesses were trying to find ways to keep employees off of social networking sites. Now the trend seems to be "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Security and IT company Lockheed Martin announced the launch of Eureka Streams, an open source social networking project aimed at large businesses.

Eureka Streams serves as a way for large companies to unite their employees -- often spread out across the country or around the globe -- and give them greater access to colleagues and groups relevant to their work. It's designed to mirror the "simple and fast communication experience knowledge workers are accustomed to outside the workplace."

By creating personal profiles outlining their job responsibilities and interests, workers can locate others in the corporation working on similar projects. Eureka Streams gives employees the tools to collaborate and stay on top of relevant news and information within the company no matter where they're located geographically.

Visually, Eureka Streams is a combination of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Personal profiles let workers to put a face to a name, which is particularly useful for making remote workers feel connected to each other beyond a disembodied voice on a conference call. Plugins allow for real-time sharing of business-related information, including the ability to share articles from Google Reader and import bookmarks from Delicious. Powerful search features help employees network and connect with other professionals within the company.

Eureka Streams a great way to bring the ever-growing field of remote workers together and allow users of huge companies to connect with other employees beyond their immediate cube farm. It's already got a lot of really great features in place for a newly-launched, with more to come. Learn more at the project's Google Group or check out the source code for yourself at GitHub.