Tomoye Announces New Community and Social Networking Platform for Microsoft SharePoint
by Bill Ives
Tomoye is a community platform based in Ottawa Canada, that provides Sharepoint integration as I wrote about on this blog. They recently announced a new community and social networking platform for use on SharePoint, Tomoye Community Software. It is available for WSS and MOSS enabling large organizations to leverage existing SharePoint infrastructure and data. Tomoye`s approach to community and social networking is based on their experiences and industry best practices from the consumer market. They have been developing and deploying communities in the consumer market for nearly ten years.
Communities and social networking are one of the fastest growing market segments in the enterprise software market, as organizations recognize the powerful benefits of these applications including collaboration, informal learning and more. The new offering includes crowdsourced content management, real-time expertise rosters and a social view of the enterprise. Here is a sample community screen.
The platform is installed as a SharePoint layout application, deployed via SharePoint central administration, and utilizes SharePoint search and authentication provider. This means there no additional costs to organizations as it is deployed on existing SharePoint servers. Integrated search and authentication gives access to security trimmed SharePoint data.
The crowdsourced content management reduces the need for top down content management since Tomoye crowdsources this function. As users explore and mark-up content, the software tracks implicit behavior and aggregates explicit user actions to present data to community members by what their peers are using and liking. This is taking the Web 2.0 user generated content concept and applying it to managing the user generated content.
There are more enterprise 2.0 features. Tomoye also tracks and reveals experts by their online activities and by the votes of others. Changing on a daily basis, expertise rosters become real-time. In addition, Tomoye tracks user behaviour and explicit user endorsements to aggregate the most valuable and relevant content across communities and SharePoint data so users can now identify the best information assets from across the enterprise, in a single place. This announcements covers a nice ste of features to make Sharepoint more aligned with the enterprise 2.0
