The company said the new release will increase collaboration and enable users to gain insight into the collective intelligence of their organizations. In addition to social search and networking, Velocity 6.0 will promote the collaborative use of other Web 2.0 applications like virtual folders, tagging, and content mashups.

End users will be able to vote on, rate, tag, save, and share content as part of a growing collaborative environment, Vivisimo said, adding, "Velocity 6.0 allows users to add their own knowledge about information found via search directly into the search result itself in the form of free-text annotation."

As an example, the company noted that users can carry on dialogues on content within the search interface rather than utilizing the cumbersome process of sending e-mails and file attachments to colleagues. A social bookmarking feature in Velocity 6.0 enables the use of virtual folders to store search results for future reference, for instance, for use in a project.

Lynda Moulton, lead analyst of the Gilbane Group, said the Vivisimo release is "the next logical step forward for enterprise search as it makes the inevitable shift from being a productivity-enhancing tool to an open-ended collaborative application [and takes] full advantage of the benefits Web 2.0 technologies bring to knowledge workers across an enterprise."

For example, colleague profiles can be developed on data from different repositories and then displayed as a mashup application of pictures, contact information, biographical data, and recent activity, all provided in a single view, according to Vivisimo.