Sosius is a externally hosted team collaboration tool with dashboards based upon portlets. The object oriented design is cool however it could be confusing.
Sosius is targeted at the individual / team /company. If you are interested in exploring the enterprise package you would need to contact Sosius directly. I can't see any of Chicago's big Financial companies adopting it.
The product is a "portal" product and based on portlets. This lends itself to customization and third party add-ons.
At a first glance, it's widget (or portlet) orientedness seems easy to customize and understand, however after working with it, I realized it was not so intuitive.
Since 1998, under the name Webb Technologies (uk) Ltd, the original company worked helping enterprise develop online collaboration solutions "Collaborative Workspaces "a successful enterprise-grade web collaboration servcie". Sosius is the product of these years of consulting. One news article cited a company that has been using Sosius for 4 years. This doesn't quite make sense since their product just got out of beta a few months ago. It could be that they were using the original product (forefather?).
They recently announced their new free API OpenSosius opening the way for third-party companies to develop features and applications around the core product.
As mentioned above, this product does not seem to have the concept of an "organization" as such. As Rafa Needleman mentioned in her article Office 2.0 Conference preview: The flow of work, "it is being pitched as a work/life workspace". It is truly "peer to peer" in that anyone can be in a group with anyone. As such there is no "centralized" user management.
Groups are the Collaboration "place" in Sosius. And as with other products, anyone can create a group and invite anyother Sosius member to join.
When Creating a new group you can set the access level that the members of the group will have to the content of the group folder - the same access applies to all group members.
Remember Widgets are Objects, so only certain kinds of widgets can go in certain places, lets look at the widgets that can go on the Group Dashboard:
NOTE: on your personal dashboard, you have more options of the widgets that you can add.
The wonderful thing about the calendar is I can belong to 3 or 4 groups, but the calendar on my "home" page shows a combined view of all Calendars that I have access to.
Reminders are "add-on's" and can be associated with almost any widget. This is a novel concept.
It does not allow you to check the availability of other team members when scheduling a meeting.
Tasks are easy to create and stand on their own. They can be assigned to individuals or groups. They allow multiple users to update status (issue response), keeping tract of who and when each note was added. As well as an over all status of the task at hand. Reminders are inherent in their configuration.
Allows the creation of bookmarks - of course like everything, bookmarks can have tags.
Discussion Groups can be created where you can create discussion topics to which anyone who has access can add a post.
Chat rooms can be created for ongoing discussions.
As new versions of a document are checked in and you can look back at the version history, date and who checked in the document.
There is not a place to include comments about what actually changed.
However, the document can be "checked out" so that others cannot edit it.
Web pages can be created and since everything is connected via tags, any content there can be easily searched.
Database: While Databases were not part of the original list of affordances, this tool allows you to create online databases along with forms and reports. There are a number of templates to help you get started quickly.
CRM - Customer Relationship Management: Basic Customer Relationship Management system looks like a useful extensinon of the base capabilities created to help users get up to speed quicker.
Sosius: Team Workspaces Without a Server
Office 2.0 Conference preview: The flow of work
Collaborate Using Online Tools