Sparta Review

Sparta is an enterprise social networking system built on a Java platform. 

Sparta offers businesses a solution to create "Customer Communities" with the goal to create what Sparta calls "market-smart" services that allow an enterprise to "increase revenue, drive business decisions, and affect change by leveraging the collective intelligence of customers."

Sparta offers far more than most of the standard social networking communities.  In addition to the general blogs, forums and messaging - Sparta's communities are packed with unique features such as 3^rd party integration, document repositories, and even Google Maps integration.

Sparta's strength is experience.  With a stated 8 years of experience "developing, deploying, and supporting Social Networks", Sparta is poised to become a powerhouse among social networking platforms.  Sparta is focusing on the niche of creating customer communities for large and small businesses.  Sparta boasts an impressive client list including high school playbook, oh! Oxygen, Hearst-Argyle Television Inc, Lincoln, AOL, and many others.  Clearly Sparta is a market leader within the social networking industry.

Sparta Social Networking Platform

My first impression of Sparta based on the website is that this is a powerful and well-established social networking platform.  With such an impressive client list, there is little doubt that Sparta can back its claims. 

The Sparta platform was developed with Java J2EE, a powerful architecture that implies that Sparta is very likely highly compatible and customizable to the client's needs.  The community infrastructure that Sparta promotes is one of separate nodes of like-minded communities that are interconnected to a central point of management and administration.  Sparta's "CommUnity Share" solution is designed with a unique URL for each community site, but with a searchable user base among all communities under a common management umbrella.

For the most part, Sparta is a high-end social networking service that offers a customized network for business clients.  The focus of Sparta's platform isn't only a vast array of features and a flexible architecture, but it is especially the focus on analytics and metrics from data that can be extracted by the customer social network.  CEO, Jerry Sheer, commented to PC World magazine in February of 2008 that a business using a customer social network is essentially a "focus group on steroids."  Clearly the Sparta platform will be heavily focused on collecting data and metrics from the customers who make up the community.

Requirements

Since the social networking communities are handled by Sparta, there are no specific requirements for the client.  Sparta's focus is on offering a full package solution for businesses to obtain a customized and high-performance social network consisting of as many communities as the client requires for their business needs.  The Sparta website offers no pricing options, no sample download for testing, but instead offers simply a toll-free number for a quote.  This is a good sign that Sparta is geared toward the large corporate customer and a large-scale social network, not small webmasters looking to establish a small-scale social networking site.

Major Features

The Sparta model is a robust solution that is created, according to the website, to "provide a rich user experience and ease of administration."  Based on the available list of community and administrative features, this is true. 

Sparta is focused on providing a customer-based social networking platform, and this is reflected in the features that are offered as part of the social networking solution.  It's important to remember that Sparta software is offered as a customized, pre-written solution intended for a corporate customer, and not for a technically savvy webmaster seeking a social networking software solution that would be self-installed and configured.

The large range of features that Sparta offers clients includes:

•-          Blogs

•-          Groups

•-          Forums

•-          Photo Albums

•-          Polls

•-          Profanity filtering

•-          Google Maps integration

•-          Messaging and commenting

•-          Video

•-          Document repositories

•-          RSS feeds

•-          Calendars and Email notifications

•-          3^rd Party Integration

•-          Private Messaging

•-          Much more...

While the community features are certainly extensive, the administrative features offered by Sparta are just as impressive.

These include:

•-          Content Moderation

•-          Broadcast Emails

•-          Enable/disable Functions

•-          Monetizing Memberships

•-          Shopping Cart

•-          Chat

•-          Member and Profile Management

•-          RSS/XML Feeds

•-          White Labeling

•-          Advertising

•-          Web Analytics

•-          Much more...

One of the strengths of Sparta's solution is very clearly the power of the management and administration of the client's social networks. 

Performance

No test download of the Sparta social network is available.  The website, unfortunately, doesn't even provide screenshots for comparison to other social networking solutions.  Potential clients are only offered the feedback from other clients and Sparta's promotional descriptions of its own products. 

One of the few pieces of feedback can be found within the Hearst contract description on the Sparta website where Terry Mackin, the Executive VP reports on their experience in dealing with Sparta.  The website reads:

"It's great to be in business with Sparta" said Terry Mackin, Executive VP of Hearst-Argyle. "We evaluated many vendors prior to selecting Sparta and found their flexible Java-based social networking platform and shared network model best suited to meet our short- and long-term needs for scalability, ease of use, and complete control of our social network design and deployment."

Overview

The Sparta software solution is only available from their sales telephone line at 646-701-5000.   

As evidenced by the Hearst-Argyle feedback, Sparta is making inroads into corporate demand for customer social networking solutions.  Because of its Java platform, Sparta has the capacity to provide a flexible solution tailored to the specific needs of each business client.  The network solution can be scaled to suit the size customer user base and the particular requirements of the end corporate user.

The Sparta solution is very business focused and corporate based.  Any small-scale end users such as web masters or very small businesses are advised to look elsewhere for a social networking solution, as the price with Sparta is likely a limiting factor.  However for medium to large businesses and corporations, Sparta appears the have the power, experience, and capability to provide very large and comprehensive customer social networking solutions.