“8 Steps for Achieving World-Class Collaboration” Webinar Recap

In NewsGator’s webinar with Bob Hackett, VP of Information Services at Weston Solutions, we take a look at how WESTON’s Vision 2015 aligns with John Kotter’s 8 Step Process for Leading Change and achieving world-class collaboration. If you missed the complete webinar, click here to watch the on-demand version.

Step One: Create Urgency

For change to happen, the whole company has to want it. For WESTON, this includes building collaboration as a key element and participating in the World Wide Intranet Challenge benchmarking survey.

Step 2: Form a Powerful Coalition

It’s important to convince people change is necessary by encouraging strong leadership and support from key members of you organization—like WESTON’s Overall Steering Committee (including CEO, CIO, CFO & Senior VP Marketing) and Portal Advisory Group.

Step 3: Create a Vision for Change

A clear vision makes it easier for everyone to understand why you’re asking for their participation. WESTON’s vision involves the Portal being the first stop personalized gateway to all people, information, tools, and applications by 2012.

Step 4: Communicate the Vision

For best results, the vision should be communicated often and powerfully, in order to keep it fresh in everyone’s minds. WESTON’s communication includes a Senior Leadership Presentation, Annual Leadership Meeting, and continual intranet and e-mail updates. Bob says a powerful message to employees included “stressing the benefits of commenting, liking, and building a repository” within the portal.

Step Five: Remove Obstacles

After creating a structure for change, remove obstacles that inhibit empowering the people you need to execute your vision. For WESTON, this meant exploring solutions for native SharePoint 2010 and integrating NewsGator. Training for team sites is a significant part of removing obstacles. Bob says “training requirements include about two hours for site owners and six hours for site admins.” Bob also explains the importance of communicating with offices in ‘Taiwan, China & India” to ensure everyone knows what important acronyms like APAC and LAM means.

Step Six: Create Short Term Wins

Have results your staff can see within a short time frame. WESTON’s Early Adopter Program led to 1,000 profiles in the first 90 days.

Step Seven: Build on the Change

Real change runs deep. For WESTON, long-term change came with the two month “Anchoring the Portal”, community outreach, and portal minutes. In encouraging users to utilize microblogs, Bob said “If users see value in it, they will do it. We continue to try and show them this value.”

Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

Change should become a core aspect of your organization. WESTON utilized Quick Start Guides, webinars and employee incentives to make this happen. When asked about culture change in document management, Bob said the most important elements were “getting people to use SharePoint instead of their hard drives, sending links instead of putting information in e-mails, keeping documents current and relevant, and storing information in one location but linking as needed.” This also included some customization of the SharePoint 2010 portal, including “placing a global header on every page.”

Now that you have a good overview of how WESTON applied Dr. Kotter’s 8 Step Process for Leading Change to their social initiative, check out the on-demand webinar for a much richer explanation as well as a helpful Q&A session at the end.

Enterprise Social Networking Objections and Objectives in 2012

Over at InformationWeek’s terrific Brain Yard site, David Carr has an interesting piece looking at “10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles.” The article builds off 2012 predictions made by business strategist Dion Hinchcliffe, specifically that social would still be facing an uphill struggle in the enterprise this year. David does a nice job of keying in on objections and issues that we at NewsGator, as a pioneer in truly enterprise-scale social computing, have a wealth of experience in overcoming.

While individually interesting, the objections David lists tend to break down into a couple of categories: cultural and technical.

On the cultural side, objections break down to management perception issues and concerns centered on user adoption. Businesses tend to be top-down hierarchies seeking to drive productivity and improve overall business performance. Given this, there would seem to be little inclination at the management level to introduce technology that would reconfigure established reins of control or, worse, introduce a potential time sink that took workers off task.

But look closer at that management imperative. The real goal is not control, but productivity improvements that drive the bottom line. Smart businesses understand this and have learned from past technology adoption cycles – think of the early days of e-mail or instant messaging in the enterprise – that an earlier embrace is ultimately better for the bottom line. We’re seeing companies focused more on a “how do we do this right?” approach to social, rather than dawdling on “do we need to do this?”

The management-level question, “how do we do this right?” draws out a number of worker level issues and objections that made David’s Brain Yard list and we spend a fair amount of our sales and implementation cycles walking prospects and customers through them: How do keep a handle on how this thing runs? How do we organize and manage communities and their creation? How do we ensure this doesn’t become a gold-plated cyber ghetto all but ignored and abandoned? Conversely, how do we ensure that this doesn’t become a distracting time sink? Given the number, variety and size of our customer implementations – from small government agencies to large, multinational Fortune 50 firms – we have a wealth of experience to draw on, but it’s important to emphasize that the people asking these questions are typically looking for answers in order to advance, not derail, their social efforts.

On the technical side, again, the objections have a familiar ring. Business and government have been burned in the past by a rush to The Next Big Thing that leads first to an expensive integration nightmare and then to a fragile spider web of often duplicative and ill-fitting, maintenance-heavy “solutions.” Further, in today’s world of Internet-enabled business, the questions on data controls, governance and compliance go directly from legal to IT.

David’s fifth point – SharePoint – hits right where we live and thrive. He notes that Dion singled out SharePoint as a factor that has “often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in particular”. At NewsGator, we’ve been seeing more and more of the opposite effect and here’s why: SharePoint is a terrific platform for social. With the addition of NewsGator Social Sites, SharePoint becomes a seamless, leading edge social tool that checks off the list of objections cited in David’s piece, both cultural and technical.

SharePoint was built from the start as an enterprise system. Social Sites was designed from the ground up to run as a native managed service application on top of the SharePoint and Microsoft stack; no busloads of integration experts needed. This tight integration imbues Social Sites with SharePoint’s true enterprise scale feature sets that address other key technical objections to social such as control of data access, identity, scalability and connection with other enterprise systems. Other “more social” tools that started life as stand-alone, quasi-consumer point offerings focused in a single area, say, group chat, present a more complex path to these capabilities. Complexity is expensive.

In turn, Social Sites lets organizations easily turn their existing SharePoint investment into a highly manageable and productive social business solution with a feature set rivaling any other on the market. Because it seamlessly integrates with the day-to-day Microsoft tools that people already use to get their work done, Social Sites on SharePoint presents a lower barrier to entry for adoption right out of the gate. Its leading-edge, constantly expanding social feature set – from microblogging and activity streams to expert discovery, badging, and video sharing – help ensure that end users find their social enterprise experience as engaging as their Facebook time.

The past is often prologue. In social business, as was the case in the adoption of so many other enterprise technologies, organizations are looking to reduce complexity, increase value from existing investments and drive productivity to increase profits. We see these fundamentals pushing past lingering resistance to the move to the increased adoption of social business technology and putting solutions like Social Sites in an even stronger position in the coming year.

Lucky Eleven

NewsGator closed out the year with tremendous momentum! We were delighted to see our predictions for the market bear out, as more and more large enterprises moved to deploy a social fabric at global scale to drive innovation and competitive advantage. Our enterprise-class, lowest total-cost-of-ownership solution has become the enterprise social standard for the Global 2000 on the Microsoft stack.

Here are our Top 11 accomplishments for 2011:

1. We added 1 Million new paid enterprise seats worldwide.
2. Our fourth quarter was roughly as large as all of 2009.
3. We significantly exceeded our revenue, bookings, and profitability targets.
4. Yes, we’re profitable. 
5. The list of Fortune 1000/Global 2000 companies we added as clients with 10K+ seats is phenomenal. The NewsGator team could not be more excited about our global partnerships!
6. We more than tripled our Channel and Alliance partner eco-system.
7. We are Microsoft’s 2011 US Partner of the Year.
8. Global 2000 clients added from South Africa, Turkey, France, the U.K., Singapore, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Kuwait, Australia … to name a few beyond the U.S.
9. Six new NewsGator babies added!
10. Spotlight and Video Modules; Dynamics, Lync integrations; Glassboard launched; > 4 major releases of great, enterprise-class software throughout the year.
11. A gabillion awards won!

Enterprise social has emerged; we are extremely proud to be at the forefront, and are committed to continuing to delight our clients and partners worldwide. 

Happy New Year, and we hope to see you at our 2012 Collective in March!

 

PS – Check out how to join our rock star team!

Remaining Attendee Questions from Recent eBay Webinar

To follow up on our recent webinar with Ramin Mobasseri of eBay, here are his answers to the remaining questions we were not able to get to during the webinar Q&A session. If you missed it, click here to check out this on-demand webinar!

Q: How has ESN affected the productivity of eBay’s workforce? Has time dedicated to ESN decreased time dedicated to actual work? Have you seen an increase in employee engagement and retention since the solution was implemented?

Ramin: It is too early to determine that but we do have our benchmarks and metrics through the Employee Pulse Survey. Next year we will hopefully do a comparison. There are, of course, other quantitative ways to do this, such as measuring the number of blogs, profile changes, microblog, #tags, etc. The key is to correlate such information to key areas like user adoption, increased productivity, and decreasing attrition rates for instance.

Q: Are you applying standards to community design? Do you enforce/promote standardization?

Ramin: Yes, we have branded the communities the same as the Hub with designated master pages and styles sheets.

Q: How many dedicated resources took part in your project?

Ramin: Seven.

Has NewsGator complicated your migration to SharePoint 2010? Do you see it as a complication going forward?

Ramin: Not at all. We upgraded first and then applied NewsGator to our environment. But remember, we also had NewsGator in our DEV, QA, Sandbox, and Staging environments. I think we practiced enough to know if something was going to go wrong. We also carried out an extensive performance and load test before and after, and all the indications were that NewsGater had not affected the environment negatively.

Q: How has ESN impacted the utilization of email?

Ramin: It's too early to tell.

Q: Where in the organization was this initiative sponsored?

Ramin: Global Corporate Technology and Operational Excellence

Q: If you could offer just three words of advice to other companies just starting to roll out enterprise social computing what would they be?

Ramin: I can give you three phrases instead: start small, test & learn, and focus on user adoption.

Q: Can you provide a few examples of how you encouraged executive sponsorship and user adoption?

Ramin: Executives want to and need to get closer to their groups, and sometimes, simple newsletters are not enough. So suggest building a CIO, CTO, and/or CFO Corner where people can connect to their leaders directly. They can share and learn from all the suggestions and questions they receive.

Use real-life scenarios, for example, a day in the life of a Project Manager, or a day in the life of the Learning & Development Team, HR, Legal, etc.

Also, apply the Find an Expert scenario within various functional groups. Sometimes finding an expert is an extremely costly initiative. So why not find those experts within your own company.

Use the benefits of social to lower costs by reducing travel and emails. Imagine when someone goes on vacation and when they come back, they will need to go through so many emails; however, if there was a community for them, they could simply browse through the community and find out what has been going on.

Q&A with Guest Blogger, Mike Hower of Strategic Knowledge Solutions

Q: Tell us a bit about your background.

Mike: After graduating from the Air Force Academy, I spent the first half of my career doing space engineering-related things like tracking satellites and space junk from a command center buried a mile deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. An organizational leadership development program at The George Washington University introduced me to Dr. Nancy Dixon, one of the key players in today’s knowledge revolution, who taught me the value of “social” and the potential of conversation to change the way organizations learn. I’ve spent the last 12 years following that path – as an Air Force commander, leadership instructor, and researcher – focused on changing the way organizations and individuals learn and lead through social learning and professional networking. After retiring from Air University in 2011, I connected with Strategic Knowledge Solutions, the organization behind the US Army knowledge management effort. I’m now the SKS Chief Learning Officer, responsible for bringing our work in organizational learning, knowledge management, and leadership to a broader audience.

Q. How did you end up creating, introducing, and leading an online community?

Mike: In 2004, I was the commander of an Air Force unit at Thule Air Base, Greenland, a small base about 750 miles from the North Pole. I was a relatively junior officer, and, as such, I didn’t have an opportunity to attend the Air Force command and staff school prior to assuming command. There were five other people in the same boat as me, all at other small Air Force units around the globe. We created an informal community to help each other get through.

When I returned home to attend the Air Force command and staff school, I participated in a research project building a formal Community of Practice (CoP) to support Air Force commanders – folks like me –all around the world. We called the program “Commanders Connection” and modeled it after the Army Professional Forums programs at Ft. Leavenworth and West Point. Within a year of launch, we reached 1250 commanders, out of a possible 2500, proving (to me at least) the power of social computing to improve learning across the enterprise. The program grew into a social learning and professional networking research project which I directed for the next five years, focused on creating social best practices to improve the way individuals and organizations do business.

Q: How did your military training and experience inform your approach to structured online collaboration in the military?

Mike: The military is incredibly hierarchical. Knowledge flows rigidly up and down the chain of command as doctrine, regulations, manuals, and corporate directives. At the same time, the military is replete with informal networks: inside career fields, at bases around the world, in groups of people working together to achieve goals under the most inhospitable of conditions. Some argue these informal networks are the way the real work of the military gets done.

My task at Air University was to tap these informal networks on a global scale, providing just enough structure and control to keep the chain of command happy, while still providing for a flexible, trusted environment where our members could dialogue informally and share ideas. We implemented, and then improved, a series of tools over the course of the project to meet the needs of both constituencies and produce some really great results.

Q: You invented an e-learning paradigm? Can you briefly explain?

Mike: Well, invent is a pretty strong word. We actually built upon work started by our partners at West Point and Ft. Leavenworth.

One of our challenges was to build a learning system that could achieve graduate-level results that fostered critical thinking and decision making in our students using social tools. We had a great model to follow from the team at West Point.

Working with NewsGator and my current company, the organizational leadership and learning team at West Point developed an interactive learning system using vignettes to promote cognitive development. Called Leader Challenge, students would watch a scenario, respond to a question or series of questions, and then see how all the other participants answered the challenge. After viewing the responses, they could dialogue with the responders. The results were pretty spectacular, often with hundreds of responses spawning thousands of separate conversations. That's pretty powerful stuff; social learning at its best.

At Air University, we took this to the next level, prototyping a system for social courseware and assessment, where students could work their way through a structured series of formal and informal materials, Leader Challenges, templated dialogues, and peer evaluations which we hoped would lead to higher-level learning with little or no instructor interaction. I retired from the Air Force before this research was completed, but I'm continuing to pursue it through private sector channels.

Q: Can the private sector use the Leader Challenge paradigm?

Mike: Absolutely! Leader Challenge is available today as an add-in for both your NewsGator Social Sites and Tomoye products. We also hope to present our work on social courseware and assessment sometime before the end of next year.

Q: Now that you are working in the private sector, what surprises you about social computing in business?

Mike: Business seems to be stuck between the world of the social web and the world of social business. The social web, of course, focuses on customers, marketing, and feedback. Social business, on the other hand, is all about organizational development and productivity. Comprehensive strategies, taking into account both areas, are lacking at many companies that still equate knowledge and social with IT. Of course, this is where SKS, my current company, comes in—we help organizations assess the knowledge environment ™, develop knowledge strategies, partner with the right technology vendor(s) for implementation, and provide education and training to bring everything together.

I don’t think I’ll be out of work any time soon.

Q. What are the biggest trends you are seeing in enterprise social computing?

Mike: The biggest trend I see coming in social computing has to do with social as part of a comprehensive knowledge strategy. Companies know that if they don't do social, some upstart that is more agile and innovative will come along and steal their business. Over the next few years we will see organizations fully integrate social and knowledge management into comprehensive knowledge environments focusing not just on people, process, and technology, but also culture, organizational processes, and organizational structure energized by effective knowledge leadership. Integrated systems like NewsGator Social Sites and Tomoye are perfect platforms to build this environment upon.

Q: We hear you are the MC of the NewsGator Collective User Group Meeting this coming March 2012. What are you most looking forward to during that event?

Mike: This will be my second time at the NewsGator Collective. Last year, despite extremely unusual arctic-like weather in Denver, the event was absolutely outstanding. This year the preliminary program looks even better with the addition of workshop sessions and even more interactive presentations. What I’m really looking forward to, however, is another opportunity to connect with today’s social learning and professional networking professionals. I absolutely love seeing what people are doing to improve the way organizations learn and gain advantage using social tools. Last year I left the Collective with dozens of great contacts and ideas on how to improve our own knowledge environment. I’m sure this year’s 2012 Collective will be even more exciting.

A New Social Mobile Client Available - NewsGator Social Sites 2010 for Android

As many of you know, the Android mobile operating system has exploded to be the second leading OS in the US (according to NetMarketShare).

If you have an Android phone, wouldn’t it be great to get direct access to NewsGator Social Sites 2010 from your handset – and without the frustration of a mobile Web browser?

Well, now you’ve got it! Meet our new Android Client, a native app for Social Sites 2010. This new app lets you fully participate in your familiar enterprise social computing environment 24x7 (but hopefully not while you’re driving!).

If you use a different type of smartphone, we’ve got you covered there as well with Social Sites 2010 Mobile Clients for the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry®.

Android App Features

The new Android app lets you work in Social Sites 2010 almost as if you were on your office PC. You can:

• Keep up to date with updates from your colleagues
• Update your status from anywhere
• Comment on or like someone else’s status
• Upload photos
• Get notifications about activities related to you and your interests
• See a history of your recent activity
• Browse colleagues and get their contact info
• See the latest activities from any community in which you participate

This new app is available from NewsGator now - download it today from the Android Market. For more info, click here to contact us or call (800) 608-4597.

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!

Live from the Center of the Universe!

Well, it seems that way. We’re here en masse at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles, immersing ourselves in the latest exciting developments out of Redmond. We’re lucky to be in the coolest galaxy of this universe, the SharePoint ecosystem, reconnecting with the strategic partners who help us serve our customers, including @ascentium, @aspectuc, @avanadenews, @avepoint_inc, @cardinalnow, @infusiontweets, @parivedaslns, @pointbridge, @rdacorp, and @slalom.

It’s only Day Two and we’re already brimming with ideas for improving our customers’ experience.

NewsGator CEO and President JB Holston, Vice President of Marketing Melissa Risteff, and I (Laura Farrelly) are speaking, and the whole team is straight out (in a wonderful way) with back-to-back meetings.

WPC is special for us this year because we’ll be on stage Wednesday officially receiving the 2011 Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award for the United States. This is incredible validation of our customers’ business results, our company’s hard work, and the future of productivity for the workforce.

So we’ll be connecting with the folks at Microsoft who helped make this possible, including our colleagues in business development and marketing. We’ll be picking the brains of our friends in the Office 365, Windows Azure and Cloud areas on what’s coming down the road. And we’re also looking forward to seeing JB make his cinema debut in a video during the final day’s keynote.

Oh, by the way, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 is the social networking engine for Microsoft’s elite Managed Partners, all of whom are attending WPC. The “Managed Partner-to-Partner Portal” is a creation of Microsoft, NewsGator, and OpSource.

If you’re at the WPC, say hi in person or email me. And again, cheers from the center of the universe!