First introduced last year, NewsGator’s Social Sites were built to provide Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to SharePoint Server 2007. This week they have announced several new features to Social Sites that increase the social networking and community capabilities of SharePoint even more.Social Sites adds a number of site templates, web parts, profiles and infrastructure to SharePoint’s existing infrastructure and security models. The intent of the NewsGator Social Sites is to increase employee productivity by providing a number of social computing tools behind the enterprise firewall.The existing previous version offered collaboration tools, enhanced tagging, RSS feed subscriptions and management, colleague tracking capabilities and content mash-up capabilities.The new features build on these capabilities:* A Graphical display of a person’s social network based on both implicit and explicit connections with others. In addition, users will be shown their strongest colleague connections, see recommendations for additional connection based on interest and common content, and see suggestions for the best ways to connect with new colleagues.* Enhanced employee collaboration through the creation of ad hoc communities. These communities include discussion capabilities, centralized document management, tags, relevance data and RSS feeds."Social Sites lets workers harness the social and collaborative aspect of their jobs and use each other's knowledge as a competitive advantage," said Dave Keller, GM, Enterprise at NewsGator. "SharePoint Server 2007 is a tremendously popular and effective tool for business collaboration and adding rich social networking capabilities that connect people with content only enhances the effectiveness of SharePoint Server 2007.”The whole concept of Enterprise 2.0 is becoming increasingly popular and important to organizations today. With the proliferation of SharePoint implementations in these organizations, it's good to see there's some add-on functionality that increases the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities of the product. You can test the upcoming release of Social Sites by visiting the NewsGator website. To learn more about NewsGator and their RSS and Enterprise 2.0 products, visit their website.
About the Author
Barb worked for CMSWire from November 2007 through October 2013. She has over 10 years’ experience as an IT solutions architect focusing on content management and enterprise collaboration. Connect with Barb Mosher Zinck:
