Making SharePoint Server 2007 More Social

This morning we announced the general availability of NewsGator Social Sites, an add-on to NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) that encompasses site templates, Web parts, profiles and infrastructure for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (Both MOSS and WSS).  We've worked very closely with Microsoft to help enhance the social computing capabilities of the wildly popular SharePoint platform. When you combine NGES, Social Sites and SharePoint Server, you have a fantastic platform for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration across departments, divisions and entire companies.

For those who remember our beta announcement back in June, we've added a ton of extra functionality in the latest release. At a high-level, NewsGator Social Sites allows you to:

• Bring outside content into SharePoint- One of the big issues with portals over the years has been the lack of updated and relevant content. We make it easy to bring in content automatically.
• Take content out of SharePoint with one-click0- This gets around the chicken and the egg problem of people having to check for new content and then not checking again when they expect not to find anything new. With one-click, users can subscribe to a list, blog, wiki or workspace feed and get notified when updates are made.
• Provide a great experience for SharePoint users- There are multiple benefits here. Items and articles from lists, blogs, news feeds and other sources can be marked read by individual users, solving the problem of keeping content fresh. But users also have the ability to tag items and filter their views by tags. Finally, we created a Social Sites "rollup" page that shows feed trends, active users and tag clouds, providing an easy content discovery mechanism).
• Connect people with content- In the area that is potentially the most exciting, Social Sites lays the framework for building communities through social networks. If a user clicks on a link for a content author or tagger, they can see that person's profile, which contains contact information, feed reading habits, recent contributions and recommended feeds. This is a great way to discover people with specific areas of expertise and also subscribe to beneficial content.

One of the companies using NewsGator Social Sites is Spencer Stuart. They are one of the premier executive search firms in the country and a longtime NGES customer. They are taking advantage of Social Sites to keep their Search Consultants and research staff better informed and connected. As Trapper Markelz, the firm's senior application developer notes, "NewsGator Social Sites will significantly enhance the value of our SharePoint sites. It will allow us to present both internal and external information in a single team site with greatly enhanced navigation. Social Sites will also increase the visibility of these resources through notifications that drive users back to the lists that are most valuable to them."

As I mentioned at the outset, we are working very closely with Microsoft from a marketing, sales and development standpoint around SharePoint Server and Social Sites.  In our release, Derek Burney, SharePoint GM for Microsoft says, "We built SharePoint as an extensible platform, one where our existing features such as social networking can be augmented by our partners. NewsGator Social Sites enhances SharePoint’s very popular and successful social computing and enterprise search capabilities. We are excited about our continued collaboration with NewsGator to deliver value to our mutual customers.”

I've included some screen shots below of various capabilities including

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