Extending SharePoint 2010's Enterprise 2.0 Capabilities

By Jed Cawthorne (@jedpc) Jun 2, 2010

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In my last article “Evaluating SharePoint 2010 as an Enterprise 2.0 platform” I did a quick and dirty evaluation of SharePoint 2010 against Prof. McAfee’s SLATE framework. The average score for SP2010 was 7 out of 10 which I characterised as “pretty good”. But the article noted some obvious gaps in the lower scores in some areas. I was contacted by NewsGator (news, site) to discuss how their Social Sites product helps fill those gaps in the SharePoint 2010 “out of the box” Enterprise 2.0 experience.

SharePoint's Strong Partner Ecosystem

I spoke to J.B Holston, NewsGator CEO and President and Brian Keller, Vice President of Products. The first point that JB wanted to make with reference to many of the deficits in SharePoint 2010, is that it takes a lot of time and effort for Microsoft to a get a “platform” of the size and depth of SharePoint through its development and quality assurance processes.

As such they are not as nimble and flexible as some of the smaller companies providing consumer ‘social media’ products on the public web. So, while the corporate micro-blogging features of SP2010 might not be as advanced as Twitter or Yammer, that is only to be expected, and this is where NewsGator and the other Microsoft partners in the ‘SharePoint ecosystem” come into play.

For NewsGator, focusing on enhancing particular niche areas of the product means they can iterate on 3 to 4 months cycles, compared to MS’ 3 year cycle for the platform as a whole. Having said that, JB and Brian agreed with the basic premise of my article, and apparently so do their biggest customers. 12 out of the 13 biggest NewsGator customers when surveyed earlier this year responded that they see a need to augment the basic out of the box feature set of SharePoint 2010.

So, how does NewsGators Social Sites assist in filling the gaps identified in SP2010’s E2.0 smarts?

Communities

First, the Communities aspect of SP2010 is, as Brian describes it, somewhat of a ‘virtual’ construct. It is basically Team Site collaboration with some additional features, such as being able to check out who is using the same tag’s as you for categorizing content.

Social Sites adds a template and bunch of additional features to create a true “community” site for your COP’s and COI’s:

Declared membership (who else is in this community)
Aggregated events in the in the activity stream
A selection of admin tools such as module selection, emailing and usage reporting

Any Team Site can be converted into a Social Sites Community by activating a SP ‘feature’, or sites can be created from scratch by using a Wizard

NewsGator enhancements to Communities

Activity Streams

Talking of activity streams, OOB SharePoint 2010 is a very ‘flat’ list type of experience, and Social Sites expands this area of functionality greatly by integrating directly into the SharePoint 2010 activity store. It gathers far more events including document additions, wiki creation, people joining communities, discussions, microblogging, votes and comments, etc.

It also gathers events that come from communities without requiring you to add each member as a colleague. Filtering capabilities are provided too, so that you can restrict your focus to particular colleagues or communities.

Social Sites builds on the SharePoint model for using email for digests and notifications, and again reporting capabilities have been built in. See the table below to compare basic SP2010 to Social Sites 2010 features: