NewsGator Enhances its Social Sites 2010 Platform
by Bill Ives
NewsGator recently launched Social Sites 2010 2.0, the next version of their flagship enterprise social computing software. Among other things, the new release includes enhanced community capabilities, architectures, and reporting functionality. NewsGator has also announced a new video module for Social Sites that supports enterprise learning initiatives and multimedia sharing. I have covered NewsGator on several occasions before (see NewsGator Gets More Mobile and Ramps Up Activity Streams and Analytics and NewsGator Offers Social Sites ™: A Comprehensive Enterprise Social Networking Suite). I recently spoke with Brian Kellner about their new offerings.
NewsGator is built to sit on top of SharePoint as a managed service application and does not operate independent of it. This still leaves them a majority of the market. They make SharePoint more social which is a very useful task. Brian showed me a useful architectural diagram as he explained the various components of the offering. I am providing it below and then I will walk through the different sections.
At the top are additional modules that can be added on to the core functions. Several of these additional (‘value added” in their terms) capabilities are new. I will start with the core features and then discuss the value added capabilities.
In my view the Activity Stream is one of the major components of an enterprise 2.0 platform so I am staring here. In NewsGator’s case it collects a continuous flow of events, content, and activities to provide users with relevant and timely information. You can filter all of these events including those from SharePoint, external social media streams (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn), and other internal and third-party applications. The Activity Stream can be embedded in multiple places, which is a key feature from my perspective. Here is a sample Activity Stream.
Microblogging is one of the feeds into the Activity Stream. It provides embeddable threaded discussions that allow for various interactions including ability to comment, answer, share, rate, vote, and mark for follow-up. Other features include: IM, and other third-party integrations, auto-updates based on user actions, two-way email integration, and notifications and digests.
You could also make the case that Profiles are the core feature as they provide a center of focus. NewsGator profile feature jump-starts adoption, participation, contributions, and collaboration with a simple profile-building coach to help your workforce create and maintain individual social profiles — their face to the organization. This is a good move.
Communities establish and cultivate a collaborative setting for your internal and external stakeholders. You can turn SharePoint groups into Social Sites communities of practice for projects and initiatives, or create places for colleagues to connect about common interests and best practices. Templates are available to kick-start your community planning. Converting to any of the NewsGator function from out of the box features is simple as they are Web parts and the change can be made with a mouse click.
Social Insights allow you to measure and track activity by community, type, and user. Easy-to-consume dashboards and monthly activity reports allow you to evaluate user adoption and participation levels. The transparency of an enterprise platform allows for increased metrics so this is a very useful function. The desktop client allows you to participate in the Social Sites environment without being inside the platform.
Brian also went over the new features at the top of the architectural stack. The Video Stream is a new feature that enables employees to quickly post and play videos in their Activity Streams for on-the-fly training, product demos, new concept explanations, customer stories, and other uses. You can see the interface for Video Stream below.
NewsGator just announced Spotlight – a badging, recognition, and expertise discovery module that is driven by measurable participation that allows users to be recognized as subject-matter experts and earn merit-based, electronic badges, while letting organizations quickly locate, recognize and motivate top performers. Here is a sample set of badges, as well as a sample expertise diagram that shows the relationship of people to a topic. The closer you are to the topic core, the more involved you are with the topic.
The Idea Steam provides many of the capabilities for innovation management than a number of standalone tools offer but it is integrated within the total Social Sites platform. You use it to gather, evaluate, nurture, and prioritize fresh, new ideas that can transform your organization. The Idea Stream capability supports the capture of input, feedback, and conversations from your customers, partners, and employees. Ideas can be submitted on the fly via the activity stream or via the Social Sites desktop, email, or mobile clients. The tool can be applied to a specific campaign or attached to a community on an ongoing basis.
NewsGator continues to enable RSS feeds through the News Stream module. This was its original capability and I was a user in 2004 (see my 2004 post - Finally, I’m Scanning the Web through NewsGator). It allows you to streamline and structure enterprise communications. Integrated, secure social media monitoring from news sites, blogs, wikis, external social streams (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), and enterprise applications are delivered where your employees need them.
I really like the collection of capabilities and they certainly enhance SharePoint. NewsGator has maintained a strong positive relationship with Microsoft so they can anticipate and plan their support for next steps within SharePoint. Since the NewsGator capabilities are Web parts, it is easy to swap out the native SharePoint version of such tools as micro-blogging for the NewsGator version.
