Microblogging, ‘Socialpedia’ and Knowledge Explorer Expand Collaboration Capabilities in NewsGator Social Sites 3.0

Latest enterprise social computing enhancements enrich emerging ‘operating system for business’

DENVER – NewsGator today announced the general availability of the newest version of its enterprise social computing platform, Social Sites 3.0, with 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.

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.” Users can comment on one another’s status updates, search across comments and updates, and comment on any activity reported in Social Sites’ activity streams. Status updates can be contributed via email to make it easy for people to push updates remotely and API’s allow integration to and from other systems.

Microblogging expands social computing’s role as the new operating system for business – a system that supplants email, folders and siloed applications enabling the default enterprise architecture for the way people really work. Nonetheless, Twitter, the wildly popular consumer microblogging service, is probably the wrong approach for the enterprise.

“In most corporate situations, we find that using a dedicated enterprise product such as the microblogging capability in enterprise social software platforms is highly preferable over using a consumer social networking site for business purposes,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for collaboration and social software at Gartner Research. “Consumer sites are generally not designed for corporate use. While they can be used for these purposes, the vendors do not cater to enterprise requirements like security.”

Available today, NewsGator Social Sites 3.0 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.

“These enhancements are driving the maturation of Enterprise 2.0 and sharpening its focus not so much on tools per se, but on people, their expertise and the connections they make,” said Brian Kellner, NewsGator’s vice president of products. “The result is collaboration at a level that just hasn’t been possible with the frameworks that enterprises have had in place to date.”

Enhancing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Social Sites 3.0 extends the capabilities of the Office SharePoint Server content management and collaboration platform, one of Microsoft’s most successful and fast-growing products, by providing a Facebook-like social computing experience.

For more information on Social Sites, 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. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.