NewsGator Delivers New Business Value for Enterprise Social Computing

Social Sites 2.5 enhances Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007’s enterprise social computing capabilities with new analytics, search resources, activity streaming features and more

DENVER — NewsGator today unveiled a new version of Social Sites, its comprehensive enterprise social computing solution, giving organizations powerful new ways to work smarter and solve business problems faster.

NewsGator Social Sites lets companies activate a “Facebook for the Enterprise” that delivers measurable business results. Advancing that mission, Social Sites 2.5 introduces new capabilities for optimizing the value of an enterprise social network, accelerating new employee productivity, improving search results, automating robust activity streams, and leveraging its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 foundation.

“GroupM selected NewsGator because it is the ideal product for enhancing the social computing features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,” said John Donnarumma, GroupM’s chief information officer. “We believe that social computing will drive improved communication, simplify the discovery of knowledge and experts, and enhance collaboration. The new capabilities of Social Sites 2.5 are laser-focused on advancing business benefits like these.”

Social Sites 2.5 serves an enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration market that will hit $1.8 billion by 2013, projects Forrester Research. Enterprise social networks will provide “context to content,” allowing workers to connect with like-minded colleagues and collaborate in new ways, the analyst firm says.

Microsoft owns the lion’s share of the business social software market – 34 percent – through SharePoint, according to the Radicati Group. Social Sites 2.5 enriches the offering. “Many organizations are turning to SharePoint as the platform for their enterprise social computing initiatives,” said Christian Finn, director for SharePoint product management at Microsoft. “We expect social computing on and around the SharePoint platform to increase significantly this year, and Social Sites 2.5, with its advanced social networking capabilities, will help drive this adoption.”

Optimizing value
Social Sites 2.5 gives organizations new insights into their enterprise social networks in order to fine-tune them for increased business benefit. Through a high-level dashboard, administrators can oversee user, group, tag, community and feed activity with the option of drilling all the way down to the article level. A corporate communications manager, for example, can determine exactly how audiences interact with their messages. Each report can be exported as XML to Microsoft Office Excel or any reporting engine.

Accelerating new employee productivity
A social network’s value hinges on individuals finding users or communities that are valuable, fresh and relevant. To this end, a new On-Boarding Wizard enables users to quickly associate tags (keywords) with themselves based on their roles and professional focus. These tags enable new users to quickly and automatically forge valuable relationships with the right mix of individuals and communities throughout the enterprise.

Improved search
Social Sites 2.5 improves search results within an enterprise social network, making it easier to establish more valuable connections with individuals, communities and content. Social Sites 2.5 includes SharePoint webparts that enable organizations to leverage the SharePoint Search Center to discover communities, people, content and tags established within Social Sites. In fact, NewsGator Social Sites interoperates with any search solution based on the emerging Open Search standard, enabling organizations to use the enterprise search engine of their choice.

Robust activity streams
Social Sites 2.5 enhances organizational awareness by giving users a single, unified view for staying updated on colleagues, communities and SharePoint activity. Social Sites 2.5 captures colleagues’ activity in real time as they tag themselves or an article, rate content, report their status, or perform over 20 other types of actions. Users can also subscribe to colleagues’ external feeds – from a blog, Twitter, Facebook or any designated source – if the originator wishes to offer the feeds to others. Administrators can determine which activities are trackable.

New ways to leverage Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
NewsGator Social Sites 2.5, which operates on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables users to create a community discussion around any article, document, or blog post created in SharePoint. Content can be rated on a five-point scale within Social Sites to enhance discovery by other users. In addition, users can privately tag content to prevent conveying sensitive information.

“We developed these capabilities after painstakingly identifying the key success factors for enterprise social computing,” said Dave Keller, enterprise GM at NewsGator. “In addition to using the product every day in our own company, we’ve hunkered down with our customers and prospects, immersed ourselves in literature, received feedback from Microsoft’s product team, and looked at the gaps in competing products. We’re confident these enhancements will drive even bigger return on investment for our customers.”

Companies interested in learning more about Social Sites 2.5 should visit http://www.newsgator.com/business/socialsites/default.aspx.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value. The company’s enterprise social networking and widget services are in use by hundreds of the world’s most recognized brands, including Biogen Idec, CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic, Procter & Gamble and USA Today. NewsGator Social Sites and Enterprise Server give enterprises better ways to collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge and improve productivity. NewsGator Widget Services enable media and brand companies to better engage their audiences and extend the value of their brands through viral syndication of content. NewsGator also offers free, award-winning RSS aggregators for the Web, desktop, mobile devices and e-mail clients. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.