NewsGator Adds Innovation Management to Social Computing Solution

By Barb Mosher | Published May 7, 2009

If you are listening closely, there are probably a lot of employees in your organization with a lot of great ideas. Problem is, they aren't getting to the right people. Newsgator (news, site) has a solution to help you bring those ideas to the forefront. It's called Social Site Ideas and it is part of the latest release of Social Sites 2.7.

Social Sites Ideas

Perfect to use for things like Product Development or Business Process improvements, Social Sites Ideas is a way to get ideas out in the open and allow others to comment on them.

Social Sites - Innovation Management

Fully integrated into the enterprise social computing environment — Social Sites — Social Sites Ideas allows employees to submit ideas and lets others vote and comment on these ideas. Employees can be notified of new ideas, comments and votes.

The most popular ideas are packaged up and sent to management for review and possible implementation.

Ideas, or Innovations, can be viewed within a single community or searched across all communities. You can also find ideas by filtering on popularity or status. And you can also set up private communities to develop a particular idea.

Other New Features in Social Sites 2.7

Social Sites - Communities

Social Sites is built on the SharePoint 2007 platform. Along with the release of Social Sites Ideas, there are also several other enhancements to this latest release:

Activity Stream Email Digest: A new mobile email digest, updated every 24 hours, lets you know about user and community activities.
New Web Parts: Social Network graph, List of Followers, User Activity for past 30 days (for Admins)
Community Features: You can now add blog, wiki or announcement modules to communities. Likewise administrators can restrict this ability.
RSS Reader: Read, mark, tag, clip, rate and initiate discussions on items in your own feeds or found on the Enterprise server.

Social Sites - Reporting

Social Sites - Social Networking Graph

It's interesting to see how the various social computing solutions are adding new capabilities to enhance their offerings and help organizations develop effective communities.

Innovation Management is a critical component to any organization today that is trying to survive and compete in this tough economy. Anything that helps bring the grassroots ideas to the forefront is good to have.

Many of the best ideas are discussed around lunch room tables or at the water cooler. Social Sites Ideas may just be what is needed to get them on "paper".

Learn more about the latest version of Social Sites on the NewsGator website.