SharePoint Integration: The Chickens and The Pig

Lately I’ve been hearing more social computing vendors talk about integration with Microsoft SharePoint.  That’s not surprising.  Based on my chats with analysts, it looks like at least half of the large enterprises out there have picked SharePoint as a corporate standard.  And I regularly run across companies who have not declared SharePoint as a standard, but who have tens of thousands of active SharePoint users.  So, it’s natural for other social computing vendors to want to be able to be “checked off” when customers ask about SharePoint Integration.

But what does it really mean when someone says they are “integrated”?   Agile development has a nice analogy to explain why it’s different to be a developer than, for example, a product manager or marketing person:   “With respect to breakfast, the chicken is involved in the outcome, but the pig is committed.”   Indeed, product managers (chickens) are invested in the outcome, but developers (pigs) REALLY need to make things happen!

The same is true of social computing vendors claiming to be fully integrated with SharePoint.  Several chickens exist in the market.  They make (to borrow from Gartner’s Jeff Mann) “fig leaf” levels of commitment.  Typically, users can see some data from one place in the other place, but the intent is for users to do basically all their work in the third-party platform.  Not with NewsGator Social Sites, however; users don’t ever leave SharePoint.  Profiles, communities, content, even idea creation are all happening in SharePoint.  Social Sites is the pig of SharePoint integration approaches.  Yes, I just equated my product to a pig.  But in a good way – to show our commitment. 

Let’s take it one level deeper to see why being the pig is a good thing.  After working with a lot of companies and use cases, we’ve built a simple model for enterprise social computing.  Below you can see four major elements: profiles, connections, content and activity.

All of the “chicken” approaches put the profile someplace outside SharePoint.  So the question becomes, what happens to the information in the SharePoint profile?  What do you do with all the SharePoint behaviors like People Search?  Anyone who works with corporate systems knows that having more places to keep the same information means more complexity and more work.  Also, what about privacy settings? (More on this below.)  Social Sites uses the SharePoint Profile and actually adds information to it that is indexed for search.

On the other hand, the “chicken” approaches all have their “friend” information stored somewhere else.  So if I add someone as my colleague in SharePoint, is that information just lost or ignored?  Social Sites uses the colleague relationship in SharePoint.  We also add Communities where people can join together around a project, area of interest, functional area, or avocation just by clicking a link in SharePoint.

Storing content remains one of the most dominant use cases for SharePoint.  While the “chicken systems” will typically surface views from one place or another, why should a user go to another system if they want to rate or tag a document in SharePoint?  And, more importantly, many of the “chickens” allow moving documents out of SharePoint into their system.  So now what happens with the security work set up in SharePoint?  Sometimes it’s up to the user to make a judgment call and sometimes it depends on configuring the appropriate business rules.  Ask your favorite IT security person how comfortable they feel with either user choice or having to maintain security rules in two places.

Lastly, the aggregation of activity is a primary value of all the social computing vendors.  NewsGator Social Sites captures activity from across all of SharePoint.  Whether your colleagues are dropping documents onto a My Site or writing a blog post on a team site, whether someone you’ve never met is creating an idea in your favorite community or bookmarking a cool web page on a topic you care about, Social Sites captures all of this data.  And it captures data from beyond SharePoint as well.  When I use Twitter, my colleagues see my updates.  I can email a status update from anywhere.  NewsGator Social Sites provides API’s for other systems to read and update events as well.  I’m not saying some of the “chicken systems” don’t have good activity updates, but none of them cover the breadth and depth of SharePoint updates and none of them are so intimately integrated with SharePoint privacy and security settings. 

So that brings us to the last major concept of social computing which isn’t shown – privacy and security.  SharePoint already has privacy scope controls.  It has a sophisticated security model.  Because Social Sites is built-in to SharePoint, it leverages those concepts directly.  At the end of the day, any “chicken” approaches have to maintain some separate system for these settings and do their best not to break anything that has been established in SharePoint.

NewsGator has invested a tremendous amount of effort in integrating with SharePoint over the last few years, and, hopefully, the examples above help make the value of that integration more clear.  If nothing else, just remember everyone is else is a chicken and NewsGator Social Sites is a pig.  We’re committed.

 

NewsGator Launches Social Sites 3.0

Today NewsGator announces the general availability of the newest version of its enterprise social computing platform, Social Sites 3.0; this latest version includes new features for tracking colleagues’ status, streamlining cross-community knowledge-sharing, and discovering in-house subject matter experts. Built into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, these features help NewsGator Social Sites transform content, activity, and connections into valuable social knowledge for business.

In addition, the new microblogging feature in Social Sites 3.0 lets users post short, quick Twitter-style status updates to their colleagues. These updates serve as a way to report urgent developments, train colleagues on the fly, identify helpful experts, chronicle off-site conferences, mentor/get mentored, float new ideas, build morale and otherwise harness the value of “weak ties.”

NewsGator Social Sites 3.0 also includes two other breakthrough social computing capabilities to organize valuable content and leverage reputation in large organizations:

• Socialpedia – This self-assembling, Wikipedia-style knowledge base pulls from wikis across SharePoint. Socialpedia enhances Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007’s wiki experience, with AJAX editing, tagging, rating, automated table of contents creation, custom wiki tags, and more, creating a single knowledge repository with distributed ownership.

• Knowledge Explorer – Visualize internal experts clustered around concepts with this graphical expertise map. When users click on a topic in a tag cloud, the map appears with experts arranged according to their automatically calculated expertise ratings. Knowledge Explorer takes advantage of the rich media features in Microsoft Silverlight, the software for rich web experiences.

You can learn more about Social Sites 3.0, and its brand new features, here.

Upcoming Webinar: The Benefits of Enterprise Microblogging Integrated With SharePoint

Microblogging can be a very effective means of communication, but if it’s not integrated with other core business applications then some key benefits of the solution may be lost. The ability to collaborate and eliminate knowledge silos is a key business benefit of enterprise social computing, so system integration should be taken into consideration when selecting an enterprise microblogging solution.

Please join Ashley Roach, Director of Product Management at NewsGator, and our customer, Scott Carruth, VP of Information Systems at Initiate Systems, for a 30-minute free webinar on September 29, 2009 at 2:30pm ET.  In this webinar they will share their thoughts on the business benefits and key functionality necessary for a successful microblogging solution.

The webinar will cover:

• Business use cases for enterprise microblogging
• Pros & cons of enterprise microblogging
• Brief demo of NewsGator microblogging capabilities on SharePoint

We believe that this webinar will be informative and useful for those in the following positions:

• Information & Knowledge Management Professionals
• IT Professionals
• Enterprise/IT Architects
• Emerging Technologists
• CIOs
• Corporate Communication Professionals
• Anyone Tasked With Evaluating, Recommending Or Designing Enterprise 2.0 & Social Computing Strategies

Register today for the webinar.

Upcoming Seminar: Collaboration & Social Computing with SharePoint

NewsGator's Vice President of Marketing, Laura Farrelly, will be among those speaking at an upcoming, free Microsoft seminar, "Collaboration & Social Computing with Microsoft Office SharePoint with SharePoint 2010 'Sneak Peek'" on September 16, 2009 from 8:30am - 12:00pm CT at Microsoft Offices in Chicago, IL.

The free half-day seminar will demonstrate real world examples of SharePoint driving business value through collaboration and social computing technologies.  The seminar will also include a "sneak peek" of SharePoint 2010 which will demonstrate some of the exciting new social computing features. 

Laura's session, "Extending SharePoint to Enable a Social Computing Platform" will take place 10:45-11:15am.

Register for the entire seminar here today!

NewsGator Customer, Edelman, Featured in Microsoft Case Study

One of NewsGator's customers, PR agency Edelman, was just featured in a Microsoft case study that explains how they have recently transitioned over from their outdated ASP-based intranet to a much more robust intranet that they call Infusion, which is run off of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and NewsGator Social Sites. 

The Microsoft case study shows that Edelman's "old intranet" was becoming seriously outdated: the start page was the same for every employee (i.e., there was no customization); there was no content aggregation; limited search capabilities; cumbersome sharing of documents and search for people within the community; no real collaboration tools; and IT intervention was needed every step of the way from creation of the intranet through administration of it.

However, by implementing SharePoint, Edelman gained a range of new features and functionality.  This new platform includes: detailed people search and advanced search functionality; document versioning and management; heavy RSS integration, including external feeds; email alert integration; virtual project groups (with no need for IT management); social groups; personalized home pages specific to the person who logs in; and detailed profile pages.

Edelman also wanted to add even further social networking functionality, so they used NewsGator's expertise to implement the following Social Sites webparts: RSS content aggregation integrated directly into SharePoint; bringing SharePoint feeds out via subscription; site reading lists; and many social features including, among others:

• individual status updates
• talent management
• groups
• mini social profiles
• activity streams (both internal & external)

Incidentally, NewsGator recently hosted a joint webinar with Edelman and Microsoft -- "Delivering Web 2.0 Business Value with SharePoint -- and you can access that webinar here to learn more about how Edelman leveraged both Microsoft SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites to create their new intranet.

In addition, you can access the full Microsoft case study here.

Webinar: Enterprise Social Computing - How to Leverage Your Exisiting SharePoint Technology

Please join NewsGator's Vice President of Marketing, Laura Farrelly, along with Mike Gilronan from KMA and Industry Analyst, Gil Yehuda, for a KMA-sponsored webinar, "Enterprise Social Computing -- How to Leverage Your Existing SharePoint Technology" from 12:30-1:30pm ET on Wednesday, August 26.

This webinar will focus on three broad topic areas:

• What is Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, or Social Media?
• Leveraging your SharePoint investment
• Taking SharePoint and Social Computing to the next level

NewsGator's Laura Farrelly will focus primarily on this last topic, which will go over how organizations are finding ways to take SharePoint and enterprise social computing to the next level by using tools like specific-purpose communities, content rating, tagging, and social network maps; she'll also highlight how NewsGator helps organizations build on SharePoint's capabilities.

In this webinar, you'll learn:

• How to decipher the terminology around Social Media and Enterprise 2.0
• 5 ways SharePoint users are using enterprise social computing today, using out-of-the-box capabilities
• 5 ways to amplify the value of your SharePoint enterprise social computing experience using NewsGator's Social Sites.

Register for this August 26 webinar here today!

Webinar: Boost Social Computing Adoption on SharePoint – Battelle Customer Story

A little over a year ago the questions around enterprise social computing, were focused on understanding what it entails and how to prove the business value. Fast forward a year and the questions now center around: how do we make it work, how do we get people to use it and what are best practices?

NewsGator has a wealth of experience and lessons learned around enterprise social computing deployment, adoption and best practices. However we thought you would like to hear from one of our customers! Battelle, a $5.2B research and development company that uses SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites as their social computing platform, will share their story, experience and best practices around communities . In addition to Battelle’s story, J.B Holston (NewsGator CEO & President) will discuss his thoughts and insight on the importance of adoption.

We invite you to join Tom Monroe, Manager, Knowledge Management, from Battelle and J.B. Holston, on August 27, 2009 at 2pm ET for a live webinar focused on enterprise social computing community success and best practices for adoption.

Webinar topics will include:

• The importance of social computing adoption
• Deployment and adoption best practices for internal communities
• Battelle case study
• Question & answer session

Click here to register for the webinar today.

Inc. 500 Fastest-Growing Companies Award

Some good news we’re happy to share with you: Inc. magazine has named NewsGator one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the country.

While not a complete surprise, it’s certainly an honor, and an affirmation of our rapid growth and success in enterprise social computing. Add this new proof point to our crossing of the million-user milestone with our NewsGator Social Sites enterprise social computing solution and our expanding relationship with Microsoft, and there’s no question: Social Sites is indispensable for organizations determined to find cost-effective ways to improve their business performance. As more than a million of you know, NewsGator Social Sites harnesses the power of social computing to improve innovation, sales, collaboration, recruitment, retention, expertise discovery and more.

The Inc. 500 award complements other honors for NewsGator announced in 2009, including: the Microsoft 2009 Best Social Computing Solution, KMWorld 2009 Companies That Matter, 2009 Colorado Companies to Watch, and the Upshot50 2009 Marketing Technology Leader.

We’re grateful. Honors are cool. But bottom-line results for our customers are what inspire us to keep getting better.

NewsGator Social Sites Profiled on TheAppGap.com

Over at TheAppGap.com (which bills itself as "Work 2.0 - News, views, and reviews,") Bill Ives has profiled NewsGator in an article, "NewsGator Offers Social Sites: A Comprehensive Enterprise Social Networking Suite." 

In the piece he explains how NewsGator's "customizable Social Networking Framework enhances the SharePoint "My Site" experience and provides a number of Facebook-like features behind the firewall."  He then goes on to point out some of the features of Social Sites he found of note.  For instance, he mentions Social Sites':

• auto-generated activity stream
• aggregated tag clouds
• relevant/popular content & active users

Bill discusses how Communities, within Social Sites, "are a core concept and feature" and that they're "very easy to start."  He mentions that multiple tabs indicate some of the functionality: discussion, feeds, bookmarks, members, documents, wiki, blog, and ideas.

He also explains how our new Innovation Management capability "enables employees to create campaigns, submit ideas, comment on ideas, vote for ideas, and manage a basic innovation life-cycle."  And, he rightly notes that "the system provides dynamic content discovery through public and private tags, search, and recommended content." 

Finally, he opines that "NewsGator has made the technology simple but feature set rich," which "opens up a wide range of decisions about how best to deploy the tools and how they impact business processes." 

Thanks for the coverage, Bill.  You can read his entire write-up here.

NewsGator Deepens Relationship with Microsoft & Reaches New Milestone

NewsGator is proud to cite strong momentum in the growing enterprise social computing market, and report that over one million paid business users now take advantage of its Social Sites enterprise social computing solution; Social Sites helps a wide range of organizations harness the value of social computing.  For example, NewsGator counts the top five pharma/biotech firms as Social Sites customers, including Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.

NewsGator Social Sites creates a business-class enterprise social computing environment for streamlined performance. When coupled with the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 collaboration foundation, it adds Facebook -like features for business, including networking, user profiling, people and content search, community creation, social bookmarking, activity streams, social graphing and robust reporting.

Indeed, as NewsGator CEO and President J.B. Holston says, "the sheer efficiency of connecting experts across organizations, fostering instantaneous collaboration, and organizing knowledge as it’s created argue overwhelmingly for enterprise social computing as the new standard operating system for business. Our customer success demonstrates that social computing isn’t just for early adopters anymore, and NewsGator is well-positioned to help more companies get their social computing environments up and running quickly and efficiently.”

Finally, NewsGator is honored to have recently been named a “depth-managed” independent software vendor (ISV) partner by Microsoft.  Such status is achieved by fewer than three percent of Microsoft partners. This affirms NewsGator as a strategic business partner in one of the most important, fastest-growing markets for Microsoft.

The entire press release regarding this exciting news is available here.