Grey Convergence

NewsGator makes SharePoint even more social. NewsGator Social Sites for SharePoint 2007 or 2010 delivers leading enterprise collaboration solutions for organisations, helping to overcome business challenges by providing an integrated social computing platform that supports collaboration, facilitates communication and improves worker knowledge.

Social Sites takes SharePoint to a whole new level, making your organisation truly social – with microblogging, an aggregated activity stream, a full range of mobile clients and rich social insights.

By integrating Social Sites directly into your SharePoint collaboration deployment, you can focus on delivering value to your workers and unifying your technology infrastructure, instead of building custom applications or learning and supporting additional technologies. Increase adoption among stakeholders, streamline communications, improve recruitment/retention and boost overall productivity with Social Sites.

Don’t wait to maximize the benefits of your SharePoint investment, your competition is already deploying them now. Contact us to find out how we can guide you down the path towards Enterprise 2.5 success.

Social Sites in Action at Universal McCann

Social Sites microblogging allows people to communicate, collaborate and locate knowledge from the convenience of the desktop or on the road. This intuitive Twitter-style status-updating conversation tool is built specifically for professional use, taking the water cooler concept to a whole new level. By incorporating microblogging into SharePoint, Social Sites helps you avoid the cost and overhead of another third-party solution. It also provides peace of mind in knowing conversations are secure and housed in a reliable and controlled environment. This capability allows you to take the temperature and view the culture of an organisation in a unique way.

The activity stream serves as the nerve center of your organisation, it pumps a continuous flow of recent activity – both user-generated content and information that is generated from system level activity – to provide users with relevant and timely insights.

Users can see which colleagues are uploading documents, commenting on the latest client requirements and contributing to the current buzz on Twitter – all in one centralized view. Too much information can be overwhelming, so activity streams were designed to reduce noise in the system with custom and standard filters and alerts.

It’s crucial to keep your workforce connected, informed and productive so that you can best serve your clients and partners. NewsGator Social Sites delivers email integration and rich mobile and desktop clients, connecting you in intuitive ways. You can interact with colleagues, communities of practice and content conveniently and flexibly. Don’t let your road warriors get disconnected from their colleagues or miss the latest updates – provide them with a lifeline to the organisation with Social Sites mobile clients for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry.

Innovation is an iteractive social process that benefits from concepts like crowdsourcing and collective intelligence. Whether you’re inventing new technologies, advancing existing products or trying to improve service delivery - it’s crucial to provide intuitive methods that support the capture of input, feedback, and conversations from your clients, partners and workers.

NewsGator Social Sites provides a user-friendly interface to gather, evaluate and prioritize ideas within the context of your social experience. The ideas module is integrated directly into your work stream where users can collaborate, participate and stay engaged.

What if you could parachute into an organisation and easily access all relevant information and the creators of that content? Whether your workers are new employees, project members or seasoned veterans in a distributed workforce, Social Sites gives your workforce the tools to connect with subject matter experts and manage knowledge with unrivaled efficiency.

Intuitively browse the tag cloud for relevant topics. Once a topic tag has been selected, an easy-to-read graphical representation is presented showing the experts in your organisation who have contributed the most to that body of knowledge. Social Sites helps discover in-house subject matter experts and tacit expertise based on their content creation and others' feedback.

Get a full picture of what people know by hovering over their name to view their mini profile, add them as a colleague or send a targeted message. Click on that colleague’s name to see all the areas of expertise they possess as well as a list of all their contributed knowledge. Exploring your internal knowledge base – your workforce – and pinpointing experts is a snap when you can visually navigate content and people to discover untapped assets within your organisation.

Turn your groups into communities. Social Sites communities establish a setting for your internal and external stakeholders to collaborate. Whether forming communities of practice for projects and initiatives, or creating a place for people to connect about common interests or best practices, Social Sites makes SharePoint collaboration more social.

Workers can easily create communities, join communities and recommend communities. Community members can conduct ad-hoc conversations and search for and share knowledge. Collaboration within online communities facilitates quick and informed decision making, decreases the time it takes to find the information need to do their jobs and enables people to locate expertise they might not have known existed otherwise. Improve productivity, engagement and retention with Social Sites communities - all within your SharePoint deployment.

NewsGator Social Sites makes social networking easy by jump starting adoption, participation, contributions, and collaboration with a simple wizard interface to help build and maintain individual social profiles.

What is a social profile? Think of it as your face to the organisation, a professional resume or your online reputation. NewsGator Social Sites helps people create a personal brand: highlight their unique contributions, expertise, strengths, skills and interests. For example, workers can upload personal avatars, declare past projects, proficiencies, establish descriptive tags and keywords to describe themselves.

Another crucial component of a social profile is the handshake you make with your workers. Organisational norms and guidelines can be transparent and established to ensure workers and leaders work together effectively. These social computing terms and conditions can be customized and expressly agreed upon.

So now what? Well, it’s no fun to have a social profile without friends. To continue to alleviate the friction of the participation process, Social Sites makes recommendations to each social profile – based on common content, tags, interests and content consumption habits, easily connecting people and communities.

NewsGator Social Sites allows you to facilitate productive interactions within your organisation to empower your workers to collaborate effectively and efficiently. These interactions encourage innovation and, ultimately, contribute to your bottom line.