NewsGator Socializes MOSS for Intranets

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jun 16, 2008

NewsGator Technologies was one of the nine companies who announced product integrations with Microsoft SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. For these guys though it wasn’t “breaking” news, as they have been talking about the latest version of Social Sites for a few months now.

NewsGator was one of the first vendors to offer social networking capabilities for SharePoint 2007. Social Sites 1.0 provided SharePoint with an AJAX interface, tagging and enhanced RSS capabilities along with a number of social enhancements to SharePoint lists and integrated presence.

Their latest version, Social Sites 2.0, which they announced was coming in early March, includes a number of new enhancements to take social networking inside the firewall to new heights of social excitement. This new version is a combination of social feedback, social networking and communities that leverage both the SharePoint Platform and NewsGator’s Enterprise Server. Users can now create public profiles and adhoc communities. Social Sites 2.0 is also fully integrated with email, which is an employee’s best friend.

How Social Sites is Integrated

Recently they posted a blog entry on Microsoft’s SharePoint MSDN blog that outlined how they integrated Social Sites with SharePoint. It’s an interesting read with a nice helping of coding to get your code monkey blood pumping. If you like writing web parts and web services and XML has become your new best friend, you will have no problem understanding what NewsGator did.

Web Parts and Web Services
In a nutshell, NewsGator developers extended the SharePoint runtime via a set of XML endpoints that were then used to provide data to AJAX enabled web parts. They also created a number of AJAX enabled web services. The web parts were developed using the SharePoint AJAX Toolkit available on CodePlex and a common NewsGator script library.

Communities and Security
In addition, NewsGator packaged a number of these new web parts into bundles to provide cross-organizational communities. They also extended the SharePoint Team Site Model with a number of new templates and metadata. The metadata integrates with the NewsGator Enterprise feed server. This feed server provides RSS, ATOM, OPML and tagging for a number of data sources.

SharePoint security was extended to allow public communities to control and manage their own security.

All Packaged into Features
Like all smart SharePoint developers, all the Social Sites functionality is packaged as a set of Features. This is something Andrew O'Connell stresses to do with all SharePoint development so that the functionality is easily implemented and removed. For NewsGator, the decision to implement as Features makes sense because every organization has different polices on collaboration and security. So while one type of collaboration functionality works with their polices, another may not. By deploying Social Sites as a number of Features, organizations can pick and choose what functionality they want enabled on their SharePoint Intranet.