WorkSimple Launches Free Social Goals Tool for Google Apps

Cloud ISV WorkSimple has released a so-called “Free Forever” version of its flagship Social Performance tool to the Google Apps Marketplace SaaS app store — enabling customers to take advantage of its “leading social goal platform.”

What does that mean in plainer terms? According to the press release, the goal (badum-ching) is for employees to use Social Performance and set goals for the rest of the organization to see, comment on and generally open a dialogue around. In the press release, WorkSimple hyped up the ability for managers to take advantage of “Social Goals, Suggested Goals, Feedback, WorkStory, Teams, Activity Streams and Notifications.”

Morgan Norman, CEO of WorkSimple, explained the strategy of releasing this Free Forever version as a complement to its more premium offering in a prepared statement:

“Small teams and large organizations will love this free version with the most essential features, while larger organizations will enjoy the ability to add unlimited teams, goal reviews, and social insight reporting. WorkSimple’s Social Goals gives users a simple, yet powerful, solution for team and company engagement.”

Digging into WorkSimple’s website, it looks like those premium plans cost $5 per user per month at the intermediate “team” level, and $9 per user per month for the top-tier “company” plan. Each progressive step up grants a higher degree of control and deeper reporting.

And as a quick refresher, the Google Apps Marketplace enables cloud integrators and ISVs to list their wares, with administrators able to deploy third-party tools and solutions to their Google Apps domains in just a few clicks. Google has positioned the marketplace as key to its enterprise strategy this year, and now WorkSimple is part of that vision.

It all sounds similar to what Rypple has been offering for some time now — and apparently, there’s something to the approach, since Salesforce.com bought Rypple lock, stock and barrel at the end of January 2012. We’ll keep watching the social market as it becomes an even hotter topic in 2012, so keep watching TalkinCloud.