NewsGator Social Sites – Trend Setting Social Business Solutions

When blazing a new path, someone has to get out in front of the wagon train. There are a lot of labels we place on those who break that new ground - trail blazers certainly springs to mind. Respected industry magazine KMWorld calls them trend-setters and this year, for the fourth year in a row, NewsGator Social Sites made the list.

Since 2003, KMWorld has been issuing an annual list naming companies and products it sees as leading the way in the world of knowledge management and collaboration. NewsGator Social Sites is on the list and we are, of course, thrilled to see our flagship social business software application acknowledged as a leading-edge offering in a very dynamic market. Let me expound on that last part for a moment.

If you click through and read the intro to this year’s list, you’ll see a pre-amble noting the amount of consolidation that has occurred since 2003; blurring what were once clearer product categories and functionalities. As Editor Hugh McKellar notes, “The juggernaut of consolidation keeps charging along, so what were single-point solutions a decade ago now include a broad spectrum of capabilities.” Also on the list is Microsoft SharePoint 2010. If any application on the list embodies the notion of “a broad spectrum of capabilities,” SharePoint would be it. Microsoft’s latest billion dollar business, it covers a lot of ground and does most of it really, really well.

But social business software is special. Capabilities and user expectations in social are often driven from outside the enterprise, in the consumer space where things move fast. Staying abreast of the rapid change in this market is a full time job requiring agility and focus. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 does a good job helping companies break down silos, connect disparate workgroups and improve information sharing among employees. More and more of those same organizations, however, are discovering that NewsGator Social Sites is a simple way to impart SharePoint’s broad spectrum of capabilities with true social business solutions that deliver real benefits – things like microblogging, activity streams, ideation, badging, video, and expertise discovery, to name but a few.

So, yes the lines will continue to blur, that’s the way technology has always trended. But enterprise social computing is the ultimate nexus of humans – the most social of all primates - and technology. The trend in this area is toward constant change. Stay tuned.