Village Gamer

Enterprise social software company Igloo Software has unveiled the next-generation version of their collaboration suite, including support for multilingual translation. The move breaks the language barrier by enabling international teams to rapidly and accurately translate content in the language of their choice. The additions are part of Igloo’s summer release, called Pearl, and allow employees within an organization to communicate seamlessly regardless of location, time zone, device and now language.

“The prospect of global expansion used to be a daunting process for small and midsized companies,” said Dan Latendre, CEO of Igloo Software. “The web has changed that, not just from a marketing perspective, but also operationally. With our latest release, we’ve eliminated one of the most significant barriers to collaboration, making it easier to work together regardless of location, time zone and now language.”

Igloo delivers new releases on an accelerated, 90-day development cycle, leapfrogging the traditional platform players and making sure that each customer can take advantage of the latest innovations in enterprise social technology.

Key elements of the release include:

• Multilingual content – enabling users to define their language preferences and share content, via instant or verified translations, in their native language.
• Integrated social analytics – a sophisticated reporting tool, powered by MicroStrategy, for analyzing participation, influence, activity and engagement.
• Enhanced file sharing – introduction of a brand-new HTML5 interface for drag-and-drop file sharing and an increase in file size to up to 2 GB.
• Archiving social content – ability to remove content from the search index by setting a retention schedule for specific types of content.

Worldwide collaboration can only work in a multilingual network, and that’s why Igloo now crosses international barriers with ease. Upon login, users can set their default language preference. As they collaborate with peers in different countries, a tabbed view enables instant and verified translations of all content. Igloo is currently available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and a number of customers have already launched non-English communities.

Igloo’s sophisticated social analytics engine is built on MicroStrategy’s fully integrated business intelligence (BI) platform. The integration embeds MicroStrategy’s reporting tools into the administrative console in Igloo in order to track user participation, influence, activity and engagement. Reports can be generated on an individual, team or community-wide basis, and can provide insight into everything from traffic to the most influential contributors.

Igloo’s robust file sharing capabilities have been enhanced with a more streamlined interface. Using HTML5 technologies, users may simply drag-and-drop multiple files to upload. The file size limitations have also been enhanced to support up to 2 GB.

Igloo also brings the power of archiving to social collaboration. As workflow and interactions become more visible, it decreases the time it takes to solve problems. But, it also increases the volume of content for search. Creating retention policies will remove content from the search index to enhance relevancy.