Facebook for the Enterprise – Part 4, News Feed, Mini Feed, Share, Add to Friends, Privacy Controls

So far in this blog series we’ve discussed many of the core features of NewsGator Social Sites and Facebook, including the home page, profile page and groups functionalities.  Hopefully this has provided you with a good understanding of how these features work together in Social Sites to provide a unique space for enterprise collaboration and communication. In this final post, we turn to some of the seemingly more minor features of Social Sites, and draw out their similarities with Facebook and how they can be utilized by the enterprise community.

After joining a social networking site like Facebook or Social Sites, most users immediately link up with friends and colleagues they know are also members, however, both sites also suggest potential colleagues based on common activity. Social Sites tracks SharePoint activity like communities joined, feeds subscribed to and tags added, and then displays closest current colleagues and relevant new colleagues in a Social Network Graph, allowing users to add a colleague to their community with a single click.

Much like the Facebook News Feed & Mini Feed, Social Sites offers several features to track colleague and portal activity.  The My Community’s Activity feature provides users with a chronological list of discussions, tagging, news, and document activity in their communities.  My Colleagues’ Activity displays similar information for any colleagues that a user has chosen to follow.  And the Colleagues’ Status List gives users instant access to what their colleagues are currently doing.  These features are provided as web parts that can be customized in terms of the number of items on view and placed anywhere within the Social Sites environment (homepage, profile page, etc.).

Like within Facebook, Social Sites also allows enterprise users to clip news, content and articles to their own site or share with others within the workplace community. Users furthermore have the option of commenting on the content that they clip before sharing with their colleagues and project groups.

Finally, we can’t conclude this series without talking about privacy and security.  Social Sites comes equipped with extensive privacy controls. SharePoint and Social Sites ensure that secure, internal content remains behind the firewall, and Social Sites complies with and follows the SharePoint security protocols so that users only see the content and people they have permissions to view. In addition, like with Facebook, Social Sites provides for user-level privacy by enabling enterprise users to control what feeds and attention data can be visible to their colleagues. Users have the option of removing individual web parts from their profiles or even blocking all of their feeds and attention data by simply configuring their user settings. These features allow enterprise users to access and share content to whatever extent they choose, and work and collaborate more efficiently within the SharePoint environment without sacrificing their online privacy.

As a solution built specifically for business purposes, Social Sites delivers positive results with its behind-the-firewall, social computing features.  Thanks for taking the time to read this series and contact us with any questions: socialsites@newsgator.com.