New NewsGator Whitepaper: "The Benefits of Microblogging in the Enterprise"

Today NewsGator releases a new whitepaper, "The Benefits of Microblogging in the Enterprise." This whitepaper explores the business case for microblogging, the applicability of Twitter, and a framework for evaluating microblogging products.

The premise of the whitepaper: the explosive growth of consumer microblogging solutions has many organizations wondering how enterprise microblogging might improve business performance; we tackle this question head on in this whitepaper.

In practice, enterprise microblogging -- the post of short, ad hoc messages that colleagues can follow like a stock ticker -- has produced surprising business benefits, including quicker information exchange, richer problem solving and deeper customer satisfaction. 

This new whitepaper explores these benefits and gives readers a framework for evaluating microblogging tools for the enterprise. Topics addressed in the whitepaper include: 

• Why microblogging?
• Enterprise microblogging use cases
• Why do enterprises need an internal microblogging platform?
• Microblogging functions/features to consider
• Microblogging in NewsGator Social Sites

You can download the whitepaper here. If you want to see NewsGator Social Sites’ microblogging features, check out this blog post.

NewsGator Social Sites’ Top 25 Microblogging Features For SharePoint

In light of all of the chatter over the last 24 hours about enterprise social computing and microblogging, I thought it was timely to highlight NewsGator Social Sites’ microblogging features that are built in to SharePoint.   If you have SharePoint, this is a great way to meet employee demand for microblogging in a way that easily integrates with the rest of their workflow and communications.  And for more info, check out our microblogging whitepaper released today.

1. Provide ‘Twitter-like’ microblogging capabilities within SharePoint
2. Engage in lightweight, efficient conversations or share status updates (140 characters per entry)
3. Integrate microblogging comments with Social Sites’ Activity Stream
4. Use microblogging features to comment on other SharePoint activity such as document uploads, blog posts, or wiki contributions
5. View a list of colleagues that are ‘following’ your microblogging activity
6. Integrate with social network updates from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
7. Use a “Like” capability to provide easy feedback on activities
8. Upload photos and videos to your status update via mobile, desktop, or portal
9. Automatically add thumbnails of the web page that was saved to your Bookmarks

10, Create custom lists of people and/or communities to follow

11. Filter status updates by colleagues, communities, your activity, top updates, or custom created lists of people and/or communities

12. Target messages to specific users or communities

13. Search across all microblogging activity including status, comments and events using keywords or hashtags

14. Integrate conversations within Social Sites Communities to enable focused conversations around a topic

15. Use email to update your status while away from your SharePoint social computing environment
16. Receive daily email digests of your colleagues’ microblogging activity
17. Receive email notifications on activities you have created or activities that you have commented on and use email to respond to subsequent updates on the thread

 

18. Use Social Sites’ mobile application that brings microblogging to the iPhone 
  

19.View a global conversations page that provides an overall timeline for the status activity across the organization
20. Employ hashtags to easily classify and discover status updates with a topic area
21. View a tag cloud of all hashtags used in updates

22. Enable administrators to delete inappropriate updates or comments
23. Utilize APIs for consuming and publishing activities
24. Easily support your company’s SharePoint security protocols and Active Directory implementation
25. Integrate microblogging within your employees workflow rather than providing it as a separate destination

To learn more about enterprise microblogging within SharePoint, send me an email and we can schedule a demo for your company.

Thoughts on Palo Alto Network's Report, "An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise"

Recently Palo Alto Networks released the fall edition of their Application Usage and Risk Report: An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise. There are definitely some interesting findings within the report, and I wanted to highlight some of the more noteworthy ones from the perspective of NewsGator, particularly NewsGator Social Sites for Microsoft SharePoint.

For instance the report finds that 91% of organizations they polled were using SharePoint, up dramatically from the 37% of organizations who reported using SharePoint in the spring 2009 version of their report.  (In addition, their analysis shows a "staggering" 48% year-over-year growth in the market share of SharePoint.) 

In addition, the study confirms the observation that employees are increasingly becoming (more) active contributors.  In particular, the analysis shows that employees were "significantly more active in their blogging and posting activity" compared to the spring 2009 analysis. They also found significant increases in "total session activity" and "total bandwidth consumed" by these contribution activities. Their conclusion, which is one we fully agree with at NewsGator, is that "the dramatic increase in blog/wiki activity fully supports one of the key tenets around Enterprise 2.0 applications, which is that users, consumers and contributors are often the same person." 

Another finding in the report is that "SharePoint is being deployed by management, in a top down manner" despite the fact that Gartner reports that some 30% of SharePoint deployments are actually “rogue, meaning that end-users or business groups saw a need to be more collaborative and deployed a tool that they had at their disposal."  

What's most interesting, and perhaps important, is that, according to Palo Alto Networks, two recent surveys -- the McKinsey Report on Web 2.0 & a report by AIIM -- show that respondents are reporting measurable benefits from the use of these types of collaboration tools.  More specifically, McKinsey found that 69% of companies surveyed have noted enhanced "innovation, more effective marketing, more rapid access to information, lower costs and higher revenues" and that respondents "saw an increased ability to share ideas, more rapid access to knowledge experts, and a reduction in costs for travel operations and communications."  Likewise, AIIM's report showed that more than 50% of those surveyed "consider the use of Enterprise 2.0 applications to be important or very important" citing the three most important benefits being "knowledge sharing," "information gathering," and "improved efficiency/speed" at work. 

No doubt, the results on Palo Alto Network's fall 2009 report, as well as two other reports they cite, show that Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools are not only seeing a dramatic increase in usage since earlier in the year, but that companies and employees are seeing concrete and wide-ranging benefits from the use of these tools.  All of this confirms that the social networking and collaboration tools in NewsGator Social Sites can bring measurable benefits to the day-to-day operations of enterprises.  

You can access the full Palo Alto Networks fall report here.

Upcoming Webinar: Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Practical Steps to Creating Business Value

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches can be a key driver of competitiveness and profitability.  However, since Enterprise 2.0 sits at the nexus of technology and organizational culture, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.

Key success factors include analyzing which Enterprise 2.0 approaches are most relevant to your organization, establishing effective governance process and policies, creating a timeline for initiatives, and supporting user adoption though internal 'champions.'

NewsGator will host a free webinar on Wednesday, November 18 at 2pm ET, where Ross Dawson, author of the proclaimed book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 and Chairman of Advanced Human Technologies, will provide detailed insights into the process of successfully implementing Enterprise 2.0, drawing on real-life case studies and featuring extensive content from his book.  Christy Schoon, Director of Business Consulting with NewsGator, will supply examples and best practices to help encourage user adoption.

This webinar will cover:

• How to apply the Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework to develop your own strategy and action plan
• Identifying key risks and benefits, and the process of establishing Enterprise 2.0 governance and policies 
• Making it happen: building a business case, getting buy-in, setting up pilots, and user adoption 
• Building a culture of collaboration and innovation and creating the enterprise of the future  

As a bonus, six complementary copies of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 will be drawn for attendees of the webinar!

For information on this webinar, and to register, click here.  

NewsGator Launches New ‘Everyday Enterprise 2.0’ Blog

Today NewsGator launched a new blog -- called "Everyday Enterprise 2.0."  Because Enterprise 2.0 is often derided as a buzzword enveloped in ivory-tower abstractions that confuse as much as enlighten, NewsGator today launched a new blog from the trenches of Enterprise 2.0 – yes, there are trenches – called “Everyday Enterprise 2.0,” authored by Christy Schoon, the company’s director of Enterprise 2.0 consulting. Read it at http://blogs.newsgator.com/everyday_enterprise_20/.

As Christy explains, “I work with real businesses every day that use Enterprise 2.0 to generate concrete results. My customers don’t want to argue about what Enterprise 2.0 is, whether it’s the right term, or whether it even exists. They want to know how other companies have succeeded, what they themselves can do to achieve the same benefits, and most importantly, how to do it. So I’m going to write in plain English about everyday Enterprise 2.0 from my own on-the-ground perspective working with living, breathing social computing champions at Fortune 500 companies.”

While Everyday Enterprise 2.0’s first and second posts are: “Why this blog?” and “Pimp my site," upcoming posts will focus on:

• Training 2.0
• Proofs of concept 
• Insights from the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference 
• Community manager preparation 
• The notion of "adoption for adoption's sake"  
• ...and more  

Christy tells us she also welcomes comments and links to other practical resources so that the blog can become a community for sharing real-world enterprise social computing experiences among peers.

So, visit the Everyday Enterprise 2.0 blog here, and you can also read the full press release here.

Update On FeedDemon Creator, Nick Bradbury

Many of you may know that in 2005, NewsGator acquired FeedDemon, an RSS reader for PCs that was then integrated into the entire NewsGator RSS ecosystem.  When we acquired FeedDemon its creator, Nick Bradbury, officially became a NewsGator employee.  

Since then, our enterprise business has grown faster than anticipated and NewsGator has started to focus increasingly on Social Sites for enterprise organizations.  Because of that, we recently made the decision to shut down NewsGator online and have our RSS readers sync with Google Reader.  

As a result of this change, Nick Bradbury will return to being an independent developer.  However, FeedDemon is not going anywhere and it will remain a NewsGator product. In fact, Nick has lots of exciting enhancements planned for FeedDemon.  

We'd like to thank Nick for his tireless work and significant impact to NewsGator, and we are appreciative of the incredible contributions he has made to NewsGator's RSS and social computing products.

You can read some reflections about Nick's time at NewsGator from our CTO and co-founder, Greg Reinacker here.