I have written about Awareness several times, the most recent was on the Fast Forward blog, Awareness Makes a Smart Move with Its Facebook Integration. Last week I caught up with Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct Sales, to discuss the latest version of its platform, Awareness Summer 2008. This release includes Microsoft SharePoint integration, advanced social networking functionality and portable widgets that extend Awareness-powered Web 2.0 communities to any website and third-party services such as iGoogle and Facebook. In addition, administrators of Awareness communities now have enhanced self-service reporting and metrics functionality to better understand and manage community activities.

Microsoft SharePoint users can now connect with Awareness communities on the Web, bringing external-facing social media to SharePoint users. This allows Sharepoint users to link to these external communities through web parts for social networking, content contribution, content viewing, as well as administrative and reporting functions. There is also, single sign-on, integrated search, and the Sharepoint profile can be enhanced with Awareness capabilities. This integration can support customer collaboration, marketing campaigns, market input for innovation, market research, and other community-based objectives. This Awareness – SharePoint integration can also be used to complement SharePoint for internal-facing communities.

The Summer 08 Release also provides additional ways to connect with other applications using their portable widgets and improved API. The portable widgets allow Awareness-powered communities to be extended to any page on the Internet. These widgets span a range of Awareness capabilities, including displaying and contributing community content, social networking features and more. Awareness widgets can be rapidly placed on any HTML page or third party services such as Facebook and iGoogle. The Awareness API has been extended to include the entire range of Awareness community and administrative level capabilities. This empowers companies and partners to build their own communities and integrate with other collaboration and social networking services. They can also extend and embellish the communities that Awareness builds for them. I think providing completely open APIs is a smart move, as well as all this increased connectivity.

Awareness has also increased its social networking capabilities to complement its support for user-generated content. A customizable user interface and the ability to create different types of social groups within communities can make for a more varied user experience to drive increased engagement and participation. New features include: people lists, status, profile privacy, presence and activity feeds and a personalized drag and drop user interface. There are also two new types of organizational constructions within communities. First, there are Neighborhoods, where community administrators can create structured social areas that feature comprehensive security and customization. The neighborhoods are more “top-down” and structured with assigned membership. In contrast, there are also Groups, where users can create ad-hoc social areas that other users can join by invitation or by request. McDonald’s has launched a number of the neighborhoods to connect with both employees and owner operators.

Awareness has also worked on its administrator functions. They now have increased self-service capability to report and graph participation and success metrics in their communities, including user activity, content activity and other metrics. These include user and group growth over time, most and least active users and groups, top/bottom categories, most viewed content, most commented on content, highest rated content, etc. They have also increased performance with significant increases in page views per second capability, showing 10 to 20 times performance improvements over the current Awareness release.

I think they are hitting key areas with this release, especially the increased integration, social networking, reporting, and the offering of both top-down and bottom community options. As I wrote recently in response to Andrew McAfee at the Fast Forward Summit, striking the right balance between the concepts of “emerge” and “impose” is what will define successful enterprise 2.0 offerings. Awareness is working to cover both of these bases with their Summer 08 Release.