Social Computing is the New 'Business Operating System'

NewsGator today introduced capabilities that affirm social computing as the new operating system for business – one that eclipses the bloated email inbox as the most productive home base for knowledge workers. What e-mail and the file folder system have done since the 1980s – serve as the de facto operating system for business – enterprise social computing delivers today, and does better, going forward.

Social Sites 3.0 is a significant upgrade to NewsGator’s enterprise social computing platform, and to Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in general. Companies can sign up for beta access today to see how Social Sites transforms content, activity and social graphs into “Social Knowledge.” NewsGator’s Social Sites 3.0 release includes two breakthrough capabilities to organize valuable content and leverage reputation in large organizations:

•  Socialpedia – This self-assembling Wikipedia-style internal Web site is a one-stop source of knowledge generated in topic-based online communities throughout the global organization. Socialpedia leverages an improved Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 wiki experience within Social Sites communities to create a single knowledge repository with distributed ownership. A new hire can find terminology to get productive fast. A sales representative can brush up on an arcane product feature to help close the deal. HR can explain complicated concepts just once for all to see. 
• Knowledge Explorer – Expertise maps, which take advantage of the rich media features in Microsoft Silverlight, provide an interactive graphical snapshot of the professionals in an organization that are most informed on a selected topic. When users click on a topic in a tag cloud, the map appears with experts arranged according to their automatically calculated expertise ratings. (See image above; and click for larger image.)

These new capabilities will be included as standard features in Social Sites Enterprise which is becoming the default starting point for productivity-minded knowledge workers in large businesses.

In addition, Social Sites 3.0 extends the capabilities of the Office SharePoint Server content management and collaboration platform by providing a Facebook-like social computing experience. It presents users with carefully selected content, connects them to important colleagues and involves them in productive communities.

“Social Sites 3.0 helps customers take their business-class social computing to the next level by presenting users with just the right content and connections at just the right time through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server - the industry’s most powerful enterprise social computing platform,” said Kathleen Winder, Microsoft’s Director of SharePoint and FAST Partners.  “Social Sites is a very compelling complement to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server that promises to change the way business gets done.”

To be considered for the Social Sites 3.0 beta program, please email socialsites@newsgator.com.

Also, don't forget to see NewsGator in Booth #505 at the Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference!

You can view the entire press release here.