Igloo targets its social network tools to mid-market clients

If you think about companies that offer enterprise social media tools on a grid where one axis is price and the other is complexity, it isn’t too hard to figure out what goes where, says Andrew Dixon, vice president of marketing at Igloo Software.

Yammer would go in the quadrant with the cheapest and simplest tools, while platforms such as IBM’s or Jive’s would likely be among the most expensive and complex.

“We live somewhere in between,” says Dixon, whose company offers what he calls “a purpose-built suite, primarily for the mid-market.”

The tools

Igloo’s suite of tools includes file sharing, a knowledge base for policies and best practices, a central repository for brand information such as logos and templates, idea generation spaces and a social stream similar to those in Facebook and Twitter. That shows up in an activity stream that users can filter by team.

Users can go back and forth among three different views within the suite or an Igloo-developed intranet. There’s the personal view, where users view documents, tasks, and people they follow. Then there’s the team view, where the information is all relevant to the team or teams to which the user belongs. In the corporate view, users can view information that’s important to all employees.