I have written about Tomoye, the Canadian-based community of practice platform, before (see Tomoye Brings Web 2.0 to Communities of Practice). I recently spoke with their CEO, Eric Sauve, about their integration with Sharepoint. This move by Microsoft and Toyome is consistent with the trend toward increasing Sharepoint integration that I covered in and elsewhere (see The Sharepoint Sessions Revisited – AIIM Seminar).  I was also pleased to hear that they are still doing well in the down economy like other enterprise 2.0 vendors (e.g. Are You Seeing Growth in the Enterprise 2.0 Market Even in Difficult Times?)

Tomoye Communities for SharePoint helps to break down content silos sometimes found in Sharepoint through publishing content into cross-enterprise communities.  Organizations can also more easily leverage SharePoint content beyond the walls of the enterprises.  You get the social view of content rather than the data view. Their Community Taxonomy allows for thematic based navigation to aggregate all of the different people, knowledge and conversations within an enterprise. You can look across themes rather than repositories.

Tomoye provides a question and answer feature that can be used to generate ROI evidence as well as stickiness in communities.  People can ask questions and about the depth and breath of the impact of enterprise 2.0 implementations and document the results.  These Tomoye questions and answers are available by mobile, email and within the community itself.

There is also expertise classification as Tomoye communities use a variety of techniques aside from profiles to reveal expertise and classifying it with a fine granularity. There is an expert and members tab where people can be rated as active members (by their actions), helpful members (based on others’ ratings), and most connected (based on others’ actions). This additional rating beyond profiles helps to overcome the trend that in social networking applications, more often then not, people do not fill in their personal profile or share content on their profile pages. Here is an expert classification screen,

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Tomoye communities support all types of content from documents to wikis to videos to blogs. Users can select and work with the content types they feel the most comfortable with.  There are also metrics that enable you to monitor the community. The rating factors, such as content most bookmarked, etc., most linked to, can be adjusted.  You can target the most active as influencers and work with least active to further engage them. Here is a metrics screen.

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Eric said that there is an interesting trend in most popular posts. In the short term question raise to the top and in the long term documents offering guidance tend to dominate. We saw this as in one of their own communities as the top ten for the last week had 8 questions, the top ten for the last 30 days had 5 questions and the top ten for the past 90 days had only 4 questions.

Here is a link to their community on the topic which includes videos about the SharePoint offering and more information on their Tomoye site.