NewsGator Named to Deloitte's 2011 Technology Fast 500 in North America

We are so proud to announce that NewsGator has been ranked number 192 on the list of Technology Fast 500 for 2011—Deloitte’s ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and clean technology companies in North America! Congratulations to all who put forth so much effort this past year to keep up NewsGator’s momentum and ensure the best possible product releases for our fantastic customers!

Inclusion in the Technology Fast 500 award program is based on percentage of fiscal year revenue growth from 2006 to 2010. During this period, NewsGator has made serious headway, expanding revenue with advanced 2.0 software releases, adopting new mobile capabilities, and working with new Fortune 1000 customers to elicit real business results and attain positive customer accounts. Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 program recognizes the companies that innovate, overcome obstacles and systematically defy the odds, and NewsGator has proven to embody these criteria time and time again.

This award reaffirms what we have known for some time now; people are social by nature and look to social tools to enable widespread communication and more collaborative knowledge sharing. Alongside the rapid immersion of new technologies and diverse social platforms, people have begun to share exponentially more, to collaborative more readily on questions and topics, and engage more on highly interactive tasks and projects. And the high demand for social extends easily into the workforce, where employee collaboration and combined ideation is absolutely critical to the productivity of any organization.

At NewsGator, we push the boundaries of enterprise social with our award-winning business software solutions. Our Enterprise 2.0 software, Social Sites, boosts any organization’s performance with the power of social computing, innovation management, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, and all within the familiar and secure infrastructure of Microsoft’s SharePoint platform. Our agile software team is at the forefront of a revolution in the world of work, in which enterprises of all sizes adopt social computing to drive innovation internally and externally. Customers seeing real results include Accenture, Adidas, Deloitte, Ericsson, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Merck & Co., Unisys Corporation, and the US Army.

Congratulations again to all at NewsGator for this tremendous accomplishment! Looking to get social? Visit us at www.newsgator.com to learn more about our latest software solutions and value-add modules.

Social Sites – The Enterprise Standard for the Activity Stream

That’s what our customers are telling us. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is well-established in the enterprise and is a likely springboard for coordinated social collaboration across sales, marketing and support. Salesforce.com, a pioneer in the Software-as-a-Service CRM revolution, socialized its offering with the launch last year of Chatter, a microblogging tool. This was good news for Salesforce.com users at the time, but with social computing being so prevalent throughout every facet of the enterprise a bit more breadth and reach is still needed according to several industry pundits. “Even when CRM technology has social components, the information generated isn’t optimized if it’s still siloed,” stated John F. Mancini, president of the AIIM information management industry group. “The organization needs to share that knowledge readily with anyone in the company who can use it to their advantage.”

Since NewsGator Social Sites 2010 is built into SharePoint - the enterprise collaboration platform – Social Sites is a perfect way to bring cutting edge social computing capabilities to any enterprise-wide effort. For example, we recently announced Social Sites integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and now, we’re announcing support of Salesforce.com Chatter.

This integration funnels Chatter users’ updates into the Social Sites enterprise activity stream, creating a single, centralized, powerful social business experience for users across the company no matter what their function.  Once the Social CRM information is in the central activity stream, Social Sites users can view and interact with timely updates on sales opportunities, leads, campaigns, events, contracts and more. Social Sites creates one centralized social space – allowing users to stay more focused, efficient, and effective – without having to switch from application to application in order to stitch together disconnected conversations.

A client of ours recently commented about having a number of potential activity streams in their company – stating that NewsGator is the enterprise standard for the activity stream and that they simply won’t support competing streams. Built-in and effectively designed options like NewsGator Social Sites for SharePoint 2010 result in secure, scalable, enterprise class solutions that co-exist within your existing IT infrastructure and meet the needs of today’s information workers. Our integration with CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com’s Chatter validates this fact and gives our customers one more reason to make Social Sites the activity stream standard.

An Interview with Guest Blogger: Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable

Please tell us a bit about your projects – The Community Roundtable and The Social Organization.

Rachel: I started blogging at The Social Organization in 2007 when I was an analyst at IDC because I started to see the huge potential to re-invent organizations in a way that improved peoples’ experience with them and profoundly changed the value chain. I remain very excited about the opportunity of networking and communications to align organizations internally and with the markets they serve.

In 2009, Jim Storer and I started The Community Roundtable because while technology adoption was growing quickly, there was not a lot of focus on the management element of what we now call ‘social business.’  We see community management as an emerging strategic discipline of management, not just the day-to-day activities of online engagement.  We run a peer network for community and social business leaders that is focused on sharing best practices and learning from each other and experts we bring in for discussions.  One of our goals is to educate the market, so we publish a lot of content and speak widely. We have also been working with companies in an advisory capacity to help get executives on the same page regarding the opportunities and risks of moving forward in a ‘social’ way.

Community management has certainly evolved as E2.0 has been more widely embraced in the business world. What are the top 2-3 trends you are now seeing as you consult with community managers?

Rachel: It is an interesting time in the market because attention to community management has increased dramatically, in part because of a greater understanding of its importance in making social business successful.  A few trends that I see include:

• Companies focused on internal use cases are realizing that they need community managers and it is not just an external facing role.
• Organizations are starting to understand that their community team is the human experience (whatI call the HX) that needs to parallel the user experience (UX) of their technology.
• Organizations are beginning to understand that community management is strategic and critical because they are seeing early movers like SAP, CSC, and Dell use community management teams so successfully.

What are the top 2-3 concerns?

Rachel: The top concerns/myths that I see – and believe are important to address methodically – are:

• Extending the ability to communicate broadly across an employee base. Social networks can expose a lack of alignment in ways that other communications tools do not and can bring up a lot of HR hiring, training, and cultural issues, which can be significant.
• Adding another tool and requirement to already strapped employees. While this tends to be a common concern, if thoughtfully implemented and managed, social networks should relieve rather than add to information overload.
• Social networking will just enable wasting time. This concern comes up less often but we still hear it. The truth is that chitchat is often how we build relationships with people we don’t know well. That is an important first step on the road to cross-functional collaboration. Understanding the role of socializing to foster collaboration is critical for managers.

What is your perspective on Google+ in the enterprise?

Rachel: Google+ is a really interesting tool. My favorite feature by far is the Hangout feature, which enables a close-to-real-life meeting across global geographies. That is game changing for the development of relationships. The circles and privacy features are also interesting but they come with a high overhead for managing them at the individual level. I think Google will work on solving that issue but I think there is a lot of potential in the architecture of the product.  Google+ as such may not be the solution internally for large organizations because of security and privacy issues – it is a little too easy to publish to the wrong stream right now.

With your years of experience you have probably had direct experience with SharePoint (and clearly so have we!). What have you heard from community managers about SharePoint and/or NewsGator as far as community building since SharePoint 2010 was announced?

Rachel: The biggest issue that I hear that comes up with regards to SharePoint is that there are too many ‘dead’ sites within organizations. Functionality NewsGator helps with that but it’s also the lack of any community management in traditionally-deployed SharePoint contexts. Early on, IT groups got SharePoint for free so the business case was often not well developed and there was no funding for oversight of the tools. This has changed as people have realized that a lot of those initial efforts at collaboration failed.

What advice do you have for managers trying to build communities internationally? Any cultural or other issues they should keep in mind?

Rachel: Culture eats strategy for lunch, especially internally, so managers need to build strategies and plans that respect the culture and satisfy goals that fit within that culture first. Once comfortable with the online environment, you can start to stretch people’s comfort level and introduce them to new ways of working but trying to introduce too much, too quickly typically doesn’t work well.

What is the #1 use of communities you’ve seen in your career?

Rachel: The best uses of communities are when members are isolated but have a high need to connect and learn. So some of the most compelling examples I’ve seen is in health-related communities in terms of value to the members. For instance, health-related support groups have emerged to help and connect individuals who would have otherwise never met and turn into a daily networks of connections.  I’ve also seen really compelling use cases about sharing expertise internally in a way that drives huge cost savings across an enterprise.

How many communities do you belong to?

Rachel: Good question but that is a really hard question to answer. There are a few communities that take up more of my time, and they are closely aligned with the work I do. So obviously TheCR Network is one, but also the Enterprise 2.0 Conference community and a handful of related online groups that are closely aligned. But then there is my personal life and things that I’m interested in or are a bit further afield professionally, there are 20 or 30 different communities I keep an eye on and occasionally participate in. One of the recent ones that I’ve been participating in is a running community because I am just learning how to run – and the need to learn really drives my engagement.

Clearly you have a lot of information on the Community Roundtable website for helping community managers with best practices – but do you have 1 or 2 favorite recommendations you believe help the most when building a successful community?

Rachel: We’ve built resources for people who are new comers into this space or who need to educate others within their organizations:

Getting Your Feet Wet in Social Media
http://community-roundtable.com/getting-your-feet-wet-in-social-media-community/

For many of these resources, social tools and approaches are old hat but we forget that others need to start at the very beginning. We also do a podcast series with community managers which is a great way to hear the experiences of others: http://community-roundtable.com/category/podcasts/

Lastly, what’s the most curious or funniest community you’ve ever come across?

Rachel: I think that has to be the Thumb Wrestling Federation:
http://twf.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Community

Learn more about community management from Rachel – check out this on-demand webinar where she discusses “Community Management 101” with Eric Sauve of NewsGator.

Q&A with Rob Dallenbach: One of NewsGator’s Microsoft Gurus

Q: Tell us a bit about your background and what brought you to NewsGator.

Rob: I’ve been in the software industry for roughly 15 years. Years ago, I went to work for a Microsoft Gold Partner startup, which was developing a product on .NET 1.1 Beta. It was the advent of the web services era and I lead their B2B integration/security team.

For a number of years after, I operated my own Microsoft-based practice, contracting with a top consulting company focused on the Media & Entertainment vertical. That combination of experience was a perfect fit for the position I took at Microsoft as a SharePoint Technical Specialist, within the Communications Sector. In that role I worked with many Partner ISVs, NewsGator being one of them. I saw that Social Sites was filling an important need within SharePoint and realized there would be many mutual benefits for us to work together.

Q: Your experience at Microsoft is obviously beneficial to NewsGator customers and partners – how have you been able to leverage this experience since joining us?

Rob: It has been beneficial in a number of ways. From a structural and operational standpoint, Microsoft can be a black box to many on the outside.  Having someone with key relationships to the field and Redmond, who can navigate the various roles, is a win for both NewsGator and its customers. Having delivered many different types of customer engagements while with Microsoft, I’m also very familiar with the programs, licensing, EA benefits, funding sources, and MTC offerings that might be available to customers. Specific to product technology, my depth in the SharePoint workloads and breadth across how that fits into the larger Microsoft stack story is seen as an enormous help to our customers. Plus, it helps to have someone who can decrypt the myriad of Microsoft’s acronyms.

Q: When customers/prospects are thinking about making the investment in NewsGator how do you recommend they analyze our value vis-à-vis other E2.0 offerings?

Rob: Most current E2.0 offerings deliver on some common core capabilities, targeted at predominate use cases. Differentiation in how value is extended from that expected feature base can take many forms such as more specialized uses cases, UI/UX, administration, integration, reporting, cost, etc.

I usually encourage customers to step back and look at a more macro viewpoint of the E2.0 offerings on the market. First, we need to embrace that information workers process their work streams differently. Thus, providing an engaging experience across those modalities is essential. One of the many differentiating strengths of Social Sites is the number of ways I can participate even as my mode of operation changes throughout the day/week (e.g., browsers, direct from email clients, desktop applications, mobile apps). Secondly, the fact that Social Sites exists as a first class citizen within SharePoint, it elegantly handles many otherwise precluding enterprise issues. This is very clear to customers who have chosen SharePoint as a strategic platform, and increasingly so as they move higher within that maturity model. Governance, identity management, authorization and security trimming, content management, and search strategy are just a few of the big ticket integrated value-adds.

Q: Clearly we have a very close relationship with Microsoft (another plug for our recent Partner of the Year honor!) – what advantages does this relationship offer customers in your opinion?

Rob: Having worked closely with the Partner ISV/SI ecosystem while at Microsoft, I can say winning Partner of the Year is truly an accolade worthy of congratulations - a job well done by the whole NewsGator team.

It surprises me, on average, how little seems to be known about the Microsoft Partner landscape. NewsGator is at the Depth Managed level, which doesn’t mean a lot to many because it only applies to about 2-3% of the partners worldwide. Benefits at this level are numerous, and include things like earlier disclosures, inclusions to roadmap meetings with product management and a conduit to executive leadership. This has direct value for NewsGator customers, as they can be confident NewsGator is active in Redmond through the full development cycle. With those benefits of the relationship, there is no overlap of features and NewsGator is ahead of the curve at RTM (release to manufacturing).

Q: When customers are trying to assess the total cost of ownership (TCO) of both NewsGator and SharePoint what recommendations do you offer to help them do this?

Rob: While of course the hard figures are essential to a value computation, I too recommend that customers include the potential for soft and sometimes unquantifiable costs when calculating TCO. This goes back to the overarching SharePoint tenets and stack value proposition. Reduce application silos, reduce administration/management and associated resources/training, and rapidly respond to the needs of the business at all skill levels through common UIs and tools, etc. 

When these types of themes are recognized in reducing TCO, and SharePoint is seen as the vehicle, it will be clear that NewsGator is in alignment with those ideas. As I began to mention before, issues like identity management, duplicate profiles, security trimming, compliance, custom search connectors and ACLs, governance, and integration/development all (should) become cost considerations as you ponder supporting an enterprise need outside of your enterprise investments.

Q: You work closely with customers during implementation – what are you seeing as the more popular use cases for our software?

Rob: Most all customers have a basic social requirement around more transparent, cross-organizational collaboration. Breaking down the walls of emails and distribution lists for better knowledge capture/transfer is of peak interest.  Closely related too, are the explicit and implicit ways to target and mine that expertise.

Onboarding is another one that comes up quite often, and is certainly related to the first. How does a day-one employee jump in and start adding value faster? Equally important, how fast can they feel they are making valuable, visible contributions?

I hear an increased amount of customers who have identified that replicating a functional area of their business is a common process.

Q: If you were talking with a Global 50 company about going social for the first time what would be your first three questions to the prospect?

Rob: I always want to know where a company has been and where they are today, in terms of enterprise applications and how people get their work done. How do people collaborate today? What is the search experience/strategy?  What does content management look like? Answers to questions like these are very informative conversation starters, which lead to more focused questions, and help tremendously in understanding the company profile. What are the key use cases you’ve identified that have pushed a social initiative/imperative? How will you be measuring success?

Q: Any final thoughts for readers on maximizing their SharePoint/NewsGator investment?

Rob: My advice for maximizing the combined investment starts with standalone SharePoint; adhere to deployment best practices. Have the difficult up-front conversations. Understand architectural considerations. Conceptualize the Information Architecture. Write a governance plan; include IT and business stakeholders where possible. Plan for compliance. Have a communication and training plan. Etc. The Social implications always lead back to these core principals, and will directly affect overall uptake and adoption.

Thursday Re-Cap of SharePoint Conference 2011: It's a Wrap

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

Thursday wrapped up a great week at the SharePoint Conference 2011. As I sat at the airport waiting to board my plane home, I came across an article, “Job Listings Prove That Microsoft Still Matters.” The article described how there is a real demand for qualified .Net developers and in particular, Microsoft SharePoint skills are in very high demand! That basically summed up the entire week in Anaheim at #SPC11.

More organizations than ever before are embracing SharePoint beyond simple document collaboration. Companies are doing more and more with the platform. Based on the conversations and crowds at the NewsGator booth, the number of organizations planning and implementing social projects is just exploding. The hunger for social capabilities in the corporate world (and even the private sector) closely parallels the rate of evolution of social features in consumer markets. That leaves us all wondering, where is this “social thing” headed? - a question that came up several times throughout the conference. Fortunately, I was able to get a glimpse of the future from NewsGator President and CEO, JB Holston, and VP of Products, Brian Kellner. Here is what they shared with me:

• JB Holston's view of the future focuses on social intelligence – which he defines as emotional intelligence, but social. He described social intelligence as different than E2.0, which was focused on tools that simply enabled social collaboration. It’s different than social business, which helped us to understand that social is just infrastructure. It's not enough, social will become intelligent. It’s about the ability to have the right conversation at the right time, at the most efficient work point, in the right work context - all focused on what he calls “doing best, next”. The future also involves "always on” collaboration - whomever and whatever you need available on whatever device, whenever, allowing you to do what you need and want to do best, next. The future is one that embraces peer-to-peer social learning and the full lifecycle of social talent management. He says it's all about empowering the individual!
• Brian Kellner talked about a future that involves an increasing scale of information and communication. He referenced NewsGator’s history as an aggregator of large amounts of information and how we are leveraging our years of experience with “big data” to create a future where software provides more and more social intelligence services, filtering, recommendations, and simplicity for users. As the consumer market continues to blend into the corporate market, Brian mentioned how NewsGator’s pace of innovation is a competitive advantage to quickly deliver capabilities and value that rivals the consumer space.

I wanted to share these interesting glimpses into the future with you from my travels at the #SPC11. What was even more interesting was that no one other than NewsGator was talking about the future at the conference… which simply demonstrates NewsGator’s thought leadership and ability to innovate.

Wednesday Re-Cap of SharePoint Conference 2011: It's a Journey, Not a Destination

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

Wednesday at the 2011 SharePoint Conference my focus was 100% on customers. My numerous face-to-face customer discussions provided me with a great opportunity to listen and discuss their plans, concerns, challenges, and opportunities. Each customer is passionately focused on social computing in the enterprise; and yet, they are at different phases of their overall strategy and approach.   

One of our discussions was with a large materials science and process engineering organization with hundreds of R&D facilities around the globe. They want to leverage social technology to connect people, attract talent, and support innovation and research activities. Currently they are in the evaluation phase which is a typical first step in an organization's social journey. They are engaging their business users - helping them understand the capabilities of social technology in general. They also talked about how committed they are to SharePoint as a platform yet have been concerned about user adoption of the existing platform. Like many organizations they are doing their due diligence and looking at competitive offerings. They have tight budgets and resources and recognize that any decision will ultimately come down to total cost of ownership. I look forward to working with them as they begin their trial evaluation.

Another discussion was with a global company specializing in gases, chemicals, equipment, and services. Like the first customer I noted, they want to connect people and share product and engineering knowledge. This organization has already started on their social journey and is completing their trial evaluation - with immediate plans to move to a proof of concept as a next step. After a meeting with their CIO, it was clear they are already seeing the value of NewsGator on top of SharePoint. He told us a story about an employee in Asia who used Social Sites to engage in Q&A around a product and found an expert in the US who was able to answer his questions. The CIO told the project manager to skip the proof of concept and focus on a global launch of Social Sites! The conversation ended with a discussion about the importance of a phased agile deployment strategy, change management, and project planning.  

After these meetings, I was able to squeeze in some time to attend one conference session entitled “Creating Competitive Advantage using Social Media and Collective Intelligence” - given by Thomas Krofta of Avanade who happens to be a NewsGator customer. It was a great session and the focus tied right back to my earlier customer discussions. Krofta talked about the value of social media in the enterprise, the steps to implement social technology, and the importance of managing change. He used one of his customers as an example and walked through the phases of their social journey. Krofta then proceeded to demo Avanade’s social intranet – which uses NewsGator Social Sites for SharePoint 2010. He concluded with a summary slide that seemed to put everything in context with three keys for a successful introduction of social computing in the enterprise: (1) rollout approach, (2) change management, and (3) measurement. CMSWire has asked me to write a more detailed summary of this Avanade session - check it out. 

To conclude today's recap, I'd like to share a few relevant quotes from the Avanade presentation: 

“Social computing can’t be a standalone solution."

"Social computing is part of a company’s journey. It’s not the beginning and it’s not the end.”

Tuesday Re-Cap of SharePoint Conference 2011: Customize or Not?

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

Day Two of #SPC11 was another packed day from morning until late in the evening. There were a few interesting sessions on Tuesday that talked about social. Here is my synopsis of them: 

• Microsoft kicked off the day with a session about how SharePoint 2010 improves productivity with social focused on the out-of-the-box features along with a demo.  
• The second Microsoft session was titled “More Than My: How Microsoft is Driving Social Adoption and Intranet Transformation”. The speaker discussed how Microsoft is internally providing consumer services such as an internal social network to their employees. They talked about how the custom solution they built internally has the potential of being both disruptive and rewarding as Microsoft focuses on better connecting employees, increasing transparency, improving people and content discovery, and simplifying their intranet.
• The third “social" session was conducted by a telecomm company named TELUS. The speaker provided an overview of their approach towards social learning and included the various technologies they have integrated into SharePoint. They even showed a technical diagram that showed the five or six separate applications they use for video, recognition, microblogging, and wikis - in addition to and alongside SharePoint itself.  

I mention these sessions not only because they focused on social but they all had one common denominator. Neither organization uses NewsGator and decided instead to focus on customizations and integration of disparate platforms and SharePoint itself to enable “social” in their organizations. Of course, “enabling social” might have different technical definitions but the end goal of connecting people, social learning, transparency, etc. all seem to be the same in any organization. If your organization is focused on SharePoint and enabling social capabilities, there are really two options: 1) go and build our own custom solution, or 2) buy a third-party solution that is build on top of SharePoint from a vendor like NewsGator.   

In this budget restrained economy, custom development is expensive and consumes time, resources, and dollars that most IT groups just don’t have today. Integration and customization add complexity to administer and support. Having separate applications provides redundant user profiles and licensing, unique security and object models, multiple places for users to post content, confusion about different user interfaces, and headaches around what records to retain and how to focus on compliance.  

Bottom line is that both Microsoft’s and TELUS’ approach to social should be applauded. They are embracing the concepts strategically and are focused on enabling social capabilities for their employees. However, there is a cost and risk associated with everything - and Tuesday’s “social” conference sessions just re-emphasized the value of NewsGator Social Sites for SharePoint 2010.  

PS - To further eliminate the need to create a customized solution, Social Sites 2010 is continuing to expand to integrate with the entire Microsoft stack. This week we introduced integrations with Microsoft Dynamics and Lync. Stop by our booth (#364) to check them out!

Monday Re-Cap of SharePoint Conference 2011: Sharing Real-World Use Cases

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

The #SPC11 kicked off with a keynote address from Jeff Teper on three principles that have influenced SharePoint. Collaboration continues to be the focus along with fostering Microsoft’s partner community and building a world-class platform. He referenced the power and scalability of SharePoint as a unified platform, the importance of the cloud and new bi-directional services Microsoft will be offering for the cloud.  

The rest of my day was spent focused on customers and conference sessions. John Worrell, Director of Technical Sales at NewsGator, described yesterday as a reunion of sorts as he engaged with customers he has worked with over the years. NewsGator’s corner booth on the exhibition floor continued to be jammed with people wanting to learn more about us. The crowds of people visiting us at our booth simply reinforced the incredible interest in social computing and how it can be achieved on the SharePoint platform.  

One session on Monday I found interesting was given by Jim Kane of Paragon Consulting to an overwhelming audience of over 500 people. Jim talked about knowledge communities and offered an interesting approach to improving collaboration among teams, managing innovative knowledge, and optimizing business processes. He talked about how knowledge communities help create an environment for locating, sharing, and reusing knowledge and expertise. Jim’s presentation was focused on a framework for collaboration rather than the technology itself. However, he made reference to NewsGator and how solutions like Social Sites can enable knowledge communities and create a positive impact across global teams.

Outside of the sessions, the rest of the day was spent talking to customers and attendees about their real world journeys with SharePoint. Indeed it’s the learning and knowledge shared through these stories that has proved to be the most valuable to me so far at this event. As the day went on, the customer conversations continued late into the night at the AvePoint Red Party. The first full day of the SharePoint conference provided an amazing opportunity to talk face-to-face with existing and potential customers about their real world concerns, questions, and opportunities. Undeniably the conversations will continue beyond the conference - perhaps on NewsGator’s Social Sites for SharePoint 2010!

 

PS - Stay turned tomorrow for Tuesday's Re-cap of the SharePoint Conference! 

Kicking off the Microsoft 2011 SharePoint Conference: Day One Recap

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

Sunday, October 2nd kicked off the Microsoft 2011 SharePoint Conference. There was a lot of excitement and buzz throughout the exhibition floor with an incredible showing of SharePoint users, consultants, and vendors during the Sunday night pre-conference. NewsGator's booth (#364) was packed with dozens and dozens of people wanting to learn more about Social Sites. Not only did they stop our booth, but they stayed and waited in line for 10-15 minutes at times just to talk to someone. 

As people stopped by, I noticed one common theme - “social” is hot and everyone is considering it as organizations rethink, redesign, and migrate their intranets and extranets to SharePoint 2010. There were people from defense and government, entertainment, technology, financial services, healthcare and more. Social knows no boundaries and crosses all industry verticals. And the first step for many was simply understanding the possibilities and capabilities that NewsGator Social Sites 2010 adds on top of SharePoint.

Another common theme from Sunday evening was helping people understand the value of social itself. According to the Radicati Group (http://www.radicati.com/), around 294 billion emails are sent each day – that’s 2.8 million emails per second! We are overloaded by an inbox that has become difficult to filter and search for relevant information. We are overscheduled and are all trying to do more with less. Social technology changes how we communicate, how we “push” information to people, collaborate, and locate experts. The activity stream allows users to find information and people that are relevant to them. It puts a collaborative context around that information and an easy way to filter conversations and activities. It allows us to connect with each other no matter where we are in the world bringing transparency and visibility to people, their activities, and their relationships. And most importantly social technology allows us to collaborate from one single place without having to navigate to each community site inside SharePoint or to news and information sources outside of SharePoint. Social technology is indeed a productivity tool for knowledge workers in the 21st century.

I expect the full week of the conference to be packed with stories, learning, knowledge sharing, relationship building, and of course PARTIES! The SharePoint Conference itself is one live social event. It’s great to meet and socialize with some of the NewsGator customers we have worked with over the last several years. Once a year conferences like this allow us to further strengthen relationships, hear customer feedback, and see the excitement and continued interest about what’s coming next! Expect to hear some exciting new announcement from NewsGator during the conference as we continue to integrate, partner, and strengthen our position as a leader in the enterprise social computing world.

PS – Stay tuned tomorrow for our recap of Day Two (Mon, 10/3) at the 2011 SharePoint Conference!