Support Spontaneous Collaboration with a Sphere

Collaboration and internal group communications are often spontaneous; a quick brainstorm of ideas or an ad hoc clustering of people focused on a topic or problem. For this type of agile collaboration you don’t need a long-term, full-scale community with full document handling capability – you need a Sphere!

NewsGator Social Sites 2010 lets users quickly pull together a public or private group using distribution lists or active directory groups. Tapping into SharePoint audiences, Sphere users can easily gather the right group of people as followers to be part of the conversation – without the need of involving IT.

Since Spheres are all about agility and being flexible in a fast paced environment, simple administration of ownership is vital and easier than ever. A Sphere administrator gets a new tab in the management user interface providing them with the ability to change the ownership of a Sphere as needed. This new admin feature makes a Sphere more able to fulfill its intended function – empowering a workforce with more internal mobility whereby creating a collaborative environment that moves as quickly as your business.

To find out more about how NewsGator Social Sites and its Sphere feature can help you enable a more nimble, collaborative workforce, please visit www.newsgator.com.

Are there instances when self-created and administered breakout groups like Spheres would make sense for your organization?

Webinar Recap: How Nalco is weaving social into the fabric of their business

In NewGator’s recent webinar with Dan Flynn, Knowledge Management Manager at Nalco, we explored how McKinsey and a corporate study showed a need for a more robust set of tools for tiered services and for a higher quality knowledge system, inspired a three-prong community strategy for weaving social into the fabric of their business.
 
An Ecolab company, Nalco selected SharePoint 2010 and Social Sites 2010 to power their social and community activities, search functions, and mobile enterprise. As the platform began connecting people with content and other people, Nalco decided to focus their efforts on four areas:

• Libraries for explicit knowledge
• A social element including communities
• A search center
• A mobile component

The Power of Communities

The goal was to foster a culture change around knowledge access. Nalco discovered that communities with strong leadership and good reasons to exist thrived, while other communities with a lack of focus and leadership tended to flame out.

Nalco developed governance through previous experience, benchmarked learnings, pilot results, and consultant input. This included using the “Thou Shalt” model and dividing community types between those with clear business objectives, and those without. Nalco also identified several community success factors including:

• Strong leadership and sponsorship
• Business alignment
• Adequate resources and defined roles
• Engaged members
• Clear deliverables and activities
• Development of trusted relationships
• Standard collaborative practices
• Technology support
• Motivation and recognition
• Community measurement

They use a Health Check process on a quarterly and yearly basis as an effective way to keep communities focused and thriving. The Health Checks also serve as a roadmap to leaders.

Check out the full webinar with Nalco to learn more about their pilot process, three-prong community strategy, “Thou Shalt” process, benchmarked learnings, routine community Health Checks, and how their biggest advocate on the executive team has helped drive change and reinforce the business value of social throughout the organization.
 

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #7 Intelligent Activity Streams

In today’s digital age, the art of personal efficiency is constantly evolving. Day planners and palm pilots have become nearly obsolete, replaced with faster, sexier tools that encourage rapid information consumption, utilization and sharing.  Everyone wants to know what’s happening NOW and what will be happening 10 minutes from now.  Needless to say, it can be hard to keep up with what’s important and act on what needs to happen. 

Using a social software feature like activity streams is an important part of tracking what’s happening NOW – in your business, with your colleagues, in consumer social media…but keeping track of it all is a fluid affair.  You can literally consume every minute of every day processing the information.  How do you pick out the important bits to use or share?  Fortunately, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 can help in a number of ways. By implementing intelligent routing, filtering and visualization, and recommendation engines, NewsGator cleans up your activity feed – based on your filters and settings - delivering only the information you need.  Just as useful are recommendation engines and intelligent routing. By analyzing your online behavior, in particular, the content you are reading and searching most often, recommendation engines organize and prioritize posts specifically for you, while intelligent routing makes your network more efficient and adaptable.  Keeping your activity stream lean and relevant ultimately improves your productivity. 

After all, who needs just another tool adding to the confusion?  Don’t we want to simply remain current and share relevant information with colleagues?  Leave the passé, wannabe gadgets in the closet; just clean up your activity stream.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #6. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question and we may feature it in our next post.

Viva Microsoft SQL 2012!

Just in time for the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 launch, NewsGator now offers full support for the latest version of the data platform. We’ll be providing more details next week about our support of SQL Server 2012 in conjunction with our participation at the DevConnections Conference in Las Vegas. Make sure to swing by the expo hall and visit us at booth #321 to learn about our SQL Server 2012 announcement and get a tour of the latest and greatest features of Social Sites 2010. We’ll be at the event starting Monday, March 26th through Thursday, March 29th.

And, if you haven’t yet registered, use discount code: DEVCONVB100 to save $100 off a full conference registration. This event will cover most of the Microsoft stack with sessions specifically focused on Visual Studio, ASP.net NET and Silverlight, SharePoint, Exchange and Windows, in addition to SQL. It should be a great event - we hope to see you there!

A Special Thank You to Strategic Knowledge Solutions

The 2012 NewsGator Collective User Group Meeting took place a little over a week ago. The entire agenda was jam packed with case studies, networking opportunities, and hands-on learning experiences and it’s been wonderful to hear the continued positive feedback from attendees about how much value they were able to take away from the event.

New to the Collective this year was a full-day Social Boot Camp - a highly-engaging, interactive workshop focused on turbo-charging attendees’ social initiatives. The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Mike Prevou and Mike Hower of Strategic Knowledge Solutions using a participant-centered, wisdom-of-the-crowd approach.

Social business software is as much about people as it is technology. However, many companies that decide to go social to encourage collaboration end up conflating their business goals with technology requirements and parameters. This workshop placed a particular focus on helping attendees address this balance by determining and refining their business goals separate from the technology.

Prevou and Hower have a combined 30+ years in knowledge management (KM), organizational learning, and professional development. With their guidance, the Boot Camp covered a lot of ground: collaborative exercises, group discussions, and Q&A on social business use cases, governance, risk and compliance, measuring social success, best practices for community management, and overcoming challenges and barriers.

Feedback we received showed attendees found the interaction with peers to be invaluable. They were able to exchange and learn best practices that could be implemented immediately within their organizations. In addition, the real-world experiences shared during the Boot Camp helped attendees develop strategies to help identify the social business value within their own companies. You can’t ask for more than that from a hands-on workshop!

Suffice to say, Mike and Mike did a wonderful job and we’d like to pass along our sincerest “thank you” for a job well done!

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

NewsGator is counting down the top 8 ways Social Enterprise Software will enhance business in 2012 and beyond with our blog series dedicated to enterprise social software.

Enterprise social software takes the “hallway conversation” and brings it into the 21st century as new ways to connect people continue to evolve every day, helping to facilitate collaboration and innovation in ways not previously possible.

“Enterprise social computing, at its core is about working differently and making better use of all the people and ideas in a new way. What NewsGator brought was so much creativity and so many new social tools that made it easier for us to connect our people.” – Steve Brantner, Manager Learning & Communications at General Mills

#8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

Allowing people to ask and answer questions within a community of skilled professionals is one of the quickest ways to drive the value of cross-enterprise collaboration - by helping people solve problems in real-time through ‘simply smart’ collaboration.

As an example: imagine you are a designer integrating multiple elements from marketing to IT to sales and need clarity on a new element’s functionality. With business collaboration software, you’ll be able to quickly tap into your colleagues throughout the organization to see what others are doing and how your solutions will impact their needs. This is how smart collaboration is increasing performance for organizations.

Once a question is posed, notifications go out to community members who can then provide answers. With Social Sites from NewsGator, you can:

 

• Ask a question via email
• Participate using mobile devices (no need for Internet connectivity)
• Launch a poll
• Attach files to questions and include files in responses
• “Like” comments to provide quick feedback
• Utilize IM, video and audio conversations with available co-workers
• Create communities or Spheres to gather like-minded collaborators
• Manage your social business network in real time with easily accessed dashboard tools

The world of work has evolved. Integrating social software for the enterprise into your systems will help transform your business into a more productive and efficient organization that’s ready to compete on a global scale.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #7. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question, and we may feature it in our next post.

A Community Organizer for SharePoint Social Communities

One of the more powerful basic capabilities of Social Sites 2010 is the Communities feature, which creates a focused setting where both internal and external stakeholders can collaborate for a common, often highly specific, purpose. Social Sites 2010 makes it easy to create, join and recommend communities and now, we’re making it even easier to keep them organized.

In many organizations, communities develop a natural hierarchy as sub-groups develop, like for a multi-phased project. Keeping track of activities relevant to particular communities could be a challenge as the community structure becomes more complex. That’s where the Community Roll-Up feature in Social Sites 2010 comes in handy.

The community activity stream in Social Sites 2010 now has two settings: “Rollup Child Communities” and “Exclude Child Communities that are not followed.” The first setting causes events from communities situated at a lower level in the SharePoint site structure (the Child community) to be displayed on the activity stream of a “Parent” community sitting at a higher level in the structure. The second setting lets the community determine whether to display all sub-community activity or have it limited to only those SharePoint social communities being actively followed. There are no limits to the number of levels that can be rolled up and sub-communities with their own sub-communities (hey, it happens) can enable the feature to roll up events from those groups as they see fit.

With these capabilities, a community can keep its activity stream both comprehensive and relevant, helping members stay productive and avoid information overload. Also, because Social Sites 2010 runs as a native service on SharePoint, the new roll-up capabilities inherit enterprise-class security features. For instance, a member of a parent SharePoint community lacking access privileges to a sub-community will not see activity events from that group, regardless of rollup settings.

As social enterprise computing broadens and matures, new challenges, like dealing with the potential information sprawl of hierarchical communities, will continue to present themselves. NewsGator will keep your organization, and its SharePoint investment, one step ahead.

So, are you noticing a rise in community sprawl in your social enterprise? If so, how are you dealing with it?

“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!