GAITHERSBURG, USA: Lockheed Martin has recently launched the Eureka Streams, open source project for enterprise social networking.

Eureka Streams helps knowledge workers make informed decisions by finding relevant colleagues and groups, following their streams of activity, and engaging in conversation said a press release.

Over the past four years, Lockheed Martin has developed and deployed proprietary social media solutions across its own enterprise based on commercial software. These solutions have enabled its employees to collaboratively develop and share content through such tools as blogs and wikis, the release added.

It further added, Eureka Streams complements content-focused tools by providing a simple and fast communication experience knowledge workers are accustomed to outside the workplace. With Eureka Streams, enterprises can provide this experience to their employees in a secure environment.

According to an independent Forrester Research, Inc. report entitled “Harnessing Social Networking to Drive Transformation” dated November 2009, "Smart organizations are looking to tap into the full power of the enterprise and beyond to drive better and faster decisions and to foster innovation that will keep them at the forefront of the changing economy. One approach that’s top of mind for business technology leaders is the use of social networks to drive communities that span traditional organizational structures"

Eureka Streams provides an open platform to support agile decision making and innovation.

"Lockheed Martin drives social media adoption by finding innovative ways to integrate a social dimension into our existing processes and tools" said Monica McManus, vice president and chief information officer for Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions, which recently deployed Eureka Streams to more than 36,000 employees.

Built on open standards and powered by open source, the Eureka Streams Community Edition is licensed to developers under the Apache 2.0 open source license.