BEA has released new versions of its collaboration tools which it claims can bring social networking interactions in to the enterprise.

BEA's new AquaLogic User Interaction (UI) 6.5 will give enterprise staff the type of collaboration tools which they now take for granted as consumers, such as status updates, said Martin Percival, senior technical evangelist for BEA.

The new release of AquaLogic Interaction allows users to produce individual profile pages.

“In the outside world, people are always updating their status on networking sites but they don’t think to do such things with their colleagues, and try and work out where they are in the enterprise," said Percival.

“There is an interest on how fellow colleagues are getting on with materials and whether they have updated recent project plans,” he added. “The only other way to keep updating people is through email and people receive a staggering amount of email.”

AquaLogic UI 6.5 will allow firms to use RSS feeds and crawlers, enabling users to import content into a knowledge management framework. “The core offering is the portal is plugged into a collaboration tool, which allows you to publish tools and then use RSS to ship them out into, say, a Microsoft Office Page, so you are not locked into the portal itself,” said Percival.

The new release contains updates to AquaLogic Interaction, AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration, and AquaLogic Analytics.

Meanwhile, Percival said, there should be a final approval from the European Commission for the proposed acquisition by Oracle in "four to five weeks".