CMSWire had the opportunity to speak with J.B. Holston, CEO and President of NewsGator, on the topic of enterprise social computing and how solutions like their RSS engine -- now called Social Sites Professional -- is changing the face of social computing for enterprises today.
Getting Social with RSS
Most know NewsGator for their RSS feed syndication services. They entered the enterprise space about two years ago with a server that provides content aggregation and distribution services for RSS and XML based feeds.
RSS engines are useful because they watch what everyone is consuming and push that content back out to other users who want the same information. It's a content rich view of both people's activities and the content they are consuming.
NewsGator's RSS engine can be deployed on its own providing services such as alerts, news management and message management . The engine has been deployed in Portal enhancement projects to add personal views or widgets. It can also be deployed as part of a solution the provides social computing capabilities for SharePoint.
What NewsGator started to see was that enterprises were using their RSS server as an application integration layer for social computing applications. One example NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston cited was Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed took the NewsGator RSS engine and integrated it with SharePoint building a solution they called Unity. They then added their own functionality for blogs, wikis and such. Their objective was to capture as much expertise from their constantly revolving employee base -- one quarter of their employees retire every year -- as possible.
Less Facebook, More Community
NewsGator spends a lot of time working with enterprises to understand their needs. What they have found is that the discussion no longer centers around terms like social networking, social computing or Facebook.
Instead talk has turned to more meaningful things like collaboration and communities. This has happened for a couple of reasons according to Holston. First, terms like Enterprise 2.0, social computing and social networking mean different things to different people. So you never know if you are really talking about the same thing when you bring these terms up.
Second, terms like these are more technology based and it's difficult to prove a business case on technology only. More and more enterprises want to focus on ROI, use cases and changes in behavior. This is what the conversation has become all about.
Enterprise are looking for advice and justification to use technologies like social networking to achieves very specific business objectives.
Social Sites for the Enterprise
About a year and a half ago, NewsGator was approached by Microsoft to build social computing capabilities that would integrate and extend the SharePoint platform. This became an opportunity for them to show even more how RSS can be a foundational element to social computing capabilities.
We wrote about these Social Sites back in June when they were announced. Social Sites include RSS syndication services plus about 50 webparts for SharePoint that enhance the SharePoint experience. Most of the lists and events in SharePoint are either RSS or XML enabled, so SharePoint content can also be easily aggregated.
Social Sites functionality includes AJAX interfaces, activity streams which include both internal and external activities (like Facebook and Twitter), social graphs, tagging and social bookmarking. All functionality is available to SharePoint out of the box when you have Social Sites.
Transforming the Culture Rapidly
Holston provided some examples of how and why social computing solutions are being used in the enterprise. In most cases there is a need to transform the culture rapidly -- although it can be for different reasons.
For example, social computing solutions enable employees to easily jump into curated communities that are related to their day to day activities. In one example, employees work solely within these communities to do all their work.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Mar
30
An Optimized Customer Contact Strategy Combines Transparency and Intelligence: The State of Outbound Communications
Learn from the Neustar-commissioned Forrester Consulting study on challenges and solutions for contact centers
Webinar
Apr
5
Adopt a Modern Digital-First Marketing Strategy
Learn how to use a composable DXP to your advantage
Webinar
Apr
13
Accelerating Content Velocity Across the Digital Supply Chain
Learn to integrate DAM with upstream tools to improve workflow efficiency.
Webinar
Apr
13
Composable Commerce The Future of Retail
The Adobe Commerce approach to composable and why it's best in class
Webinar
Apr
18
Drive Business Growth Through Customer Service and Support
Defining the future of technology. What is AI’s role in the future of customer service?
Webinar
Apr
26
Future-proofing Your Marketing Through Better Customer Understanding
Understanding your customers and how to reach them in real-time across all channels
Webinar
Mar
30
An Optimized Customer Contact Strategy Combines Transparency and Intelligence: The State of Outbound Communications
Learn from the Neustar-commissioned Forrester Consulting study on challenges and solutions for contact centers
Webinar
Apr
5
Adopt a Modern Digital-First Marketing Strategy
Learn how to use a composable DXP to your advantage
By having employees complete all their work activities within communities, an enterprise can drive open collaboration as a primary way of working, getting rid of stove pipe organizational silos and reducing costs related to travel and video conferencing.
Holston says there is a view that communities democratize organizations and thus enable innovation and happier employees overall.
Younger Workforce Demands Social Computing
Another example of the need for greater collaboration and communities like Social Sites in the enterprise comes in the form of a younger workforce. Millennials often demand this type of social computing when they come into a company.
The idea is not to shut off Facebook -- which was once the general thought -- but of how that type of technology can be deployed internally to grow business. Communities of course provide a rich set of tools that make it easier to collaborate, communicate and find expertise more easily than using email or other applications.
Measure of Attention Does Not Apply
According to Holston, it is not as important to look at the measure of attention for internal communities. It's not reasonable to expect that everyone will or needs to be on a community for a certain amount of time each day. Community use is much more variegated than that.
What is important is that they are there, populating its and that others are listening and finding the information they need to do their job.
To Have a Community or Not
Social computing vendors spend a lot of time inside organizations trying to understand how they leverage technologies like social networks to do their jobs better. Switching to communities from siloed, top-down organizational structures can be a challenge though, so implementing these solutions cannot be done lightly.
NewsGator provides an interesting tool to help you determine if you really need enterprise social computing and in what format. It's called SCORE: Social Computing Online Readiness Evaluation. It's composed of 25 questions and provides you feedback on whether you need social computing capabilities or not and what kind.
It's fairly certain you can take advantage of communities internally to build strong employee, customer and partner relationships. You just need to be very clear on what you are trying to achieve and how you will know you have acheived it.
Vendors like NewsGator seem ready to help you not just with the technical solution, but with the planning process as well.
