Facebook for the Enterprise – Part 2, Homepage

Facebook’s homepage and NewsGator Social Sites’ homepage are the most content-rich sections of both sites after the profile page, which we discussed here.

As anyone who has used it knows, the Facebook homepage is where you land right after logging in. It has features like the "News Feed", any requests and notifications, a user's individual status updates, recommended friends and some socially selected new content – all presented in a simple interface that allows users to quickly scan for information and content that matters most to them, based on what their friends are reading and interacting with.

NewsGator's Social Sites homepage offers many similar features, but suited specifically to benefit the business user. These include the Colleague Tracker, which is equivalent to Facebook’s News Feed, but geared toward providing enterprise users with a single place to see what documents, blogs, and other content their colleagues are contributing to the portal/intranet. Colleague Tracker can be added to any page within SharePoint including the homepage.

In Social Sites, more business-friendly e-mail and RSS alerts take the place of the requests and notifications people see on Facebook. Social Sites also provides several powerful options to display the right kind of notifications in the right locations, whether within SharePoint itself or on the desktop or even a mobile device.

One of the most recognizable, and popular, features of Facebook is the “status”. Social Sites provides a similar feature, “My Status”, that can be updated by an individual user.  Social Sites also integrates with Microsoft presence technology to indicate status automatically without relying on users to update the information themselves.

Similar to Facebook, Social Sites' Social Network Graph also provides a list of recommended colleagues, although this is located on a user's profile page rather than the home page. Social Sites also has Site News Components that allow editors to display single articles, multiple merged feeds and more, giving enterprise users valuable access to the articles, content and projects their colleagues are reading and coordinating. With respect to editorially selected content, NewsGator provides both editorial control features as well as the marking read, tagging, and clipping capabilities. 

Ultimately, in terms of social computing for business, NewsGator offers users far more capabilities to discover colleagues and share the content needed to do their jobs. These features work together to create an entirely different social computing experience for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that turns SharePoint into a social hub to help people connect with each other and the content they need to work.