In the briefing room: NewsGator Social Sites
With hundreds of millions of regular users, social software has become a part of many knowledge workers’ daily lives – outside of the enterprise. But the value of such tools doesn’t necessarily end at the firewall.
One vendor recognizing the potential in this space is NewsGator, a company that, in the past, has been synonymous with RSS tools. NewsGator supports collaboration and social networking in the enterprise through its Social Sites offering, currently in version 2.7.
Social Sites is a social computing layer that is added on to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 deployments. It brings social features such as Ajax-based profiles, activity feeds, community creation, and idea generation functionality to SharePoint. Social Sites enables the users to build both internal and external communities, increases use of internal portals, and uses social networking to enhance communications within an enterprise. All of this takes place through SharePoint, which exports data natively in RSS, making it easy for NewsGator to hook on to.
At login, Social Sites provides a personalized start page that collects information based on a variety of factors, including one’s colleagues (the Social Sites version of Facebook friends), groups and communities the user is a member of, content preferences , and projects. The profile is customizable and during set up the system will recommend colleagues, groups, and communities based on common tags and interests. From profiles, a user’s details, contact information, ideas that have been generated, votes for ideas, tag cloud, and content subscriptions are visible. An activity feed appears on a user’s profile, similar to Facebook’s activity stream, which features relevant notifications, such as bookmarking by colleagues, events, community and group activity, document creation and editing, and content from outside Social Sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This feed can be sent out as an e-mail digest, in full or in a custom version around topics or certain kinds of activity.
Social Sites can create a social network graph linking an individual with colleagues based on common interests and activities such as tagging. A mini profile of each individual is one click away but it isn’t possible to pivot from one person’s network to another’s at this time. NewsGator says this may be included in a future release.
Communities can be created easily and quickly around projects, interests, and idea generation. The idea generation and innovation aspect of Social Sites is a good addition to the social functions; it allows brainstorming to be conducted relativity seamlessly, without having to utilize a separate system or tool.
A key area featured in Social Sites is the idea of surfacing connections between knowledge workers who do not know each other, and may be working on similar projects unbeknownst to one another. If Joe in Los Angeles is working on a presentation and posts something to that effect on his blog, and Frank in Munich is working on the same type of project and has added a wiki page on it, the system will make that connection and recommend they become colleagues in the system.
Social Sites is not intended to replace direct communication tools such as e-mail and instant messaging; rather, it serves as shared knowledge repository, be it through exposing users to content that may be relevant to them or functioning as a virtual brainstorming session. It does, however, allow companies to add valuable social networking tools onto their SharePoint deployments without the risks that the use of public social networking tools entails.