MS SharePoint: Social Computing Tools to Integrate

It's been noted that SharePoint 2010's improvements in the area of social computing are relatively impressive, but built-in features have a tendency to be outshone by third-party solutions. Ergo, we thought we'd round up a few of our favorites:

NewsGator

NewsGator (news, site) Social Sites amps up communities and collaboration within SharePoint by enabling users to create rich social profiles from which they can connect and share ideas with fellow colleagues. The company is one in just a handful that builds their solution directly on top of SharePoint, enabling them to cook up advanced capabilities like micro-blogging, communities and mobile solutions.

The company's recent acquisition of Tomoye has has translated to the upsell of Social Sites to a number of government organizations, and it looks like smooth sailing will continue well into the era of SharePoint 2010. Furthermore, the release of Social Sites for Microsoft's newest version of SharePoint was accompanied by an iPhone and an iPad client.

"Part of the reason we leverage SharePoint so aggressively is because we do see tremendous value in providing the social layer on top of broad-gauged enterprise platforms that can handle WCM, ECM, search, etc," said J.B. Holston, NewsGator CEO and President . "This has been fundamental to our strategy in enterprise social computing for a couple of years, and it’s been the right call." 

Telligent

Telligent (news, site) integrates Telligent Community with SharePoint to enhance forums, blogs and wikis. The company considers their tool as the leading social software solution for the .NET architecture. 

Telligent Community  hones in on customer engagement by:

• Providing insights directly from customers 
• Offering a scalable customer support community
• Connecting happy customers with prospects
• Inspiring two-way conversations with influential customers

Jive 

Jive Software (news, site) believes their Social Business Software Suite (SMS), is the greatest thing to happen to the enterprise since sliced bread (or something like that). Since the suite's initial release, Jive has diligently continued to add features, their most recent being the ability to take content stored in an Enterprise CMS and socialize it.

Jive's SharePoint Connector integrates SharePoint and SBS tightly enough to provide activity streams and merged workflows; however, documents must be pushed into Jive before the collaboration magic happens. This is because, Interestingly, instead of building directly on top of SharePoint, Jive makes SBS the primary work tool. And while there is a read-only view of SBS content in SharePoint, users still have to work from SBS if they want to be able to do anything—even view the content. 

Awareness

Awareness (news, site) provides social technologies for organizations that normally deal with people outside the enterprise. The integration of their software into SharePoint enables SharePoint customers to tie their internal collaboration to their external Web communities. This merging makes several nifty features possible, such as:

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Tags: atlassisan, awareness, bluekiwi, connectbeam, enterprise 2.0, enterprise cms, jive, moss, newsgator, sharepoint, social computing, social media, telligent

It's been noted that SharePoint 2010's improvements in the area of social computing are relatively impressive, but built-in features have a tendency to be outshone by third-party solutions. Ergo, we thought we'd round up a few of our favorites: