Social Media Integration: MOSS and Community Server

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 8, 2008 Comments

1 comment

Ever since its release, there have been questions about SharePoint's (MOSS') fitness as a web content management solution (see our article series on MOSS WCM).

While the jury may still be out on this question, it does not appear to be deliberating on the question of SharePoint’s social features. Microsoft is continuing to improve its community features, they have also been working closely with a partner, Telligent, who can provide this functionality as a direct SharePoint integration.

Funny thing is, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen these two products doing the tango. SharePoint Solutions has a service offering that does the exact same thing.

SharePoint’s Community Features

Yes, SharePoint does have social features like blogs and wikis. They have even been working hard to provide enhanced versions of this “adequate” out of the box capability via Codeplex.

For example, we covered the Community Kit: Enhanced Blogging Edition not that long ago. In addition, you can also download the following community features for SharePoint from Codeplex:

Enhanced Wiki
Enhanced Discussion Board Edition
User Group Edition (1.0)
External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint (Community Edition)

Microsoft has also recently provided a peek into their potential social networking solution: TownSquare. It is currently being prototyped within Microsoft's own organization but they have announced no plans to take it public any time soon, if at all. It does demonstrate however that they are looking to improve on MOSS' out of the box collaboration and social media capabilities.

Telligent Community Server

The latest release of Telligent Community Server — v2008 — hit the street just over a month ago. Community Server is a .NET-based social computing platform that includes functionality such as:

Blogs
Forums
File and Photo Gallery
Support for User Generated Content
Integrated Ratings and Comments

The latest release includes capabilities such as:

Integration with Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint
Enterprise level reporting of community activity
Social Streams or Activity Feeds (similar to Movable Type's Action Streams)
Integration with Amazon S3 for storage
On demand groups/social circles
Widgets that enable the sharing of data between applications
A complete Web Services API based on REST for integration/expansion of the platform

SharePoint / Community Server Integration - It's Not New

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last month, a number of vendors announced integration solutions for the MOSS 2007 platform. These included Atlassian, Awareness, NewsGator, Telligent and a few more.

Lawrence Liu, Senior Technical Product Manager for Community and Social Computing at Microsoft told us that the “Platform + Partners” approach is directly related to Microsoft's success overall and that they continue to leverage that model for SharePoint/MOSS in the social computing space.

“By working with our named partners in the Social Computing space, customers have the option to acquire additional functionality if they need it today to address their business needs. While we will continue to invest in improving SharePoint as a Business Productivity Platform in our future releases, we will also significantly enhance SharePoint’s Social Computing features and capabilities.”