Facebook-Like Features Behind Your Firewall

The Benefits of Social Networks

As the popularity of consumer-based social networks such as Facebook or MySpace has grown, businesses have observed the social networking and collaboration benefits they provide, including:

• Rich user profiles
• Easy discoverability of people to build a social graph
• Easy creation and joining of groups
• Easy generation of content
• Intuitive display of updates based on social graphs

Social networks built specifically for businesses provide the same benefits of consumer-based solutions along with these additional benefits:

• Offers social computing behind the firewall
• Better protects confidential, internal information
• Follows corporate security and access protocols
• Designed specifically for business purposes
• Integrates easily with other internal systems
• Standardizes social networking for lower IT support costs

Enterprise Social Computing With NewsGator Social Sites & Microsoft SharePoint

Social Sites and SharePoint provide capabilities similar to consumer-based social networks but tailored to business purposes. More importantly, Social Sites and SharePoint offer social networking features that follow corporate security protocols and keep confidential, internal information within the protected environment of the firewall. Socials Sites plus SharePoint provide the following features and more – all designed to deliver social networking, enhance collaboration, and facilitate information sharing within the context of a business:

• Profile Pages

  Driven from tacit behavior as opposed to requiring a person to update information constantly, profiles provide a quick snapshot of a users expertise by depicting their authoring, tagging, RSS reading behavior, favorite subscriptions, clipped articles, community actions and recent SharePoint activity. Social Sites profiles also enable users to include their photo, interests, work and education history.

• Groups & Communities

  Enables people to take advantage of the collaborative power of groups and provides for discoverability and easy sharing of content, as well as discussions. Social Sites recommends communities based on colleagues who are already members, as well as similar tags, read content, subscriptions and activities. Social Sites also provides for easy discovery of groups via tags, search, and lists of recently created communities. Furthermore, Social Sites communities offer a discussion component that includes rich e-mail integration, which allows users to participate in a community without ever logging in to the site. Additionally, Social Sites simplifies content additions by allowing content to be tagged into the community, added via Social Bookmarks and RSS feeds, or uploaded to a community document store. Finally, Social Sites offers Community Tracker, which provides updates from a user’s communities in one centralized place.

• Social Network Graphs

  Details a person’s colleagues based on common SharePoint activity, including tags, communities, and feeds. Also recommends new colleagues.

• News & Activity Feeds

  Provides users with a constantly updating, chronological list of their colleagues’ activities in SharePoint, including tagging, discussion activity, community actions, and document, blog, and wiki creation.

• Social Bookmarking

  Allows users to tag any URL and save to a community, their profile, or other SharePoint locations.

• Clipping/Sharing

  Enables users to clip content/news/articles and save to their own site or share with others. Users also have the option to comment on the content that they clip.