SharePoint Integration: The Chickens and The Pig

Lately I’ve been hearing more social computing vendors talk about integration with Microsoft SharePoint.  That’s not surprising.  Based on my chats with analysts, it looks like at least half of the large enterprises out there have picked SharePoint as a corporate standard.  And I regularly run across companies who have not declared SharePoint as a standard, but who have tens of thousands of active SharePoint users.  So, it’s natural for other social computing vendors to want to be able to be “checked off” when customers ask about SharePoint Integration.

But what does it really mean when someone says they are “integrated”?   Agile development has a nice analogy to explain why it’s different to be a developer than, for example, a product manager or marketing person:   “With respect to breakfast, the chicken is involved in the outcome, but the pig is committed.”   Indeed, product managers (chickens) are invested in the outcome, but developers (pigs) REALLY need to make things happen!

The same is true of social computing vendors claiming to be fully integrated with SharePoint.  Several chickens exist in the market.  They make (to borrow from Gartner’s Jeff Mann) “fig leaf” levels of commitment.  Typically, users can see some data from one place in the other place, but the intent is for users to do basically all their work in the third-party platform.  Not with NewsGator Social Sites, however; users don’t ever leave SharePoint.  Profiles, communities, content, even idea creation are all happening in SharePoint.  Social Sites is the pig of SharePoint integration approaches.  Yes, I just equated my product to a pig.  But in a good way – to show our commitment. 

Let’s take it one level deeper to see why being the pig is a good thing.  After working with a lot of companies and use cases, we’ve built a simple model for enterprise social computing.  Below you can see four major elements: profiles, connections, content and activity.

All of the “chicken” approaches put the profile someplace outside SharePoint.  So the question becomes, what happens to the information in the SharePoint profile?  What do you do with all the SharePoint behaviors like People Search?  Anyone who works with corporate systems knows that having more places to keep the same information means more complexity and more work.  Also, what about privacy settings? (More on this below.)  Social Sites uses the SharePoint Profile and actually adds information to it that is indexed for search.

On the other hand, the “chicken” approaches all have their “friend” information stored somewhere else.  So if I add someone as my colleague in SharePoint, is that information just lost or ignored?  Social Sites uses the colleague relationship in SharePoint.  We also add Communities where people can join together around a project, area of interest, functional area, or avocation just by clicking a link in SharePoint.

Storing content remains one of the most dominant use cases for SharePoint.  While the “chicken systems” will typically surface views from one place or another, why should a user go to another system if they want to rate or tag a document in SharePoint?  And, more importantly, many of the “chickens” allow moving documents out of SharePoint into their system.  So now what happens with the security work set up in SharePoint?  Sometimes it’s up to the user to make a judgment call and sometimes it depends on configuring the appropriate business rules.  Ask your favorite IT security person how comfortable they feel with either user choice or having to maintain security rules in two places.

Lastly, the aggregation of activity is a primary value of all the social computing vendors.  NewsGator Social Sites captures activity from across all of SharePoint.  Whether your colleagues are dropping documents onto a My Site or writing a blog post on a team site, whether someone you’ve never met is creating an idea in your favorite community or bookmarking a cool web page on a topic you care about, Social Sites captures all of this data.  And it captures data from beyond SharePoint as well.  When I use Twitter, my colleagues see my updates.  I can email a status update from anywhere.  NewsGator Social Sites provides API’s for other systems to read and update events as well.  I’m not saying some of the “chicken systems” don’t have good activity updates, but none of them cover the breadth and depth of SharePoint updates and none of them are so intimately integrated with SharePoint privacy and security settings. 

So that brings us to the last major concept of social computing which isn’t shown – privacy and security.  SharePoint already has privacy scope controls.  It has a sophisticated security model.  Because Social Sites is built-in to SharePoint, it leverages those concepts directly.  At the end of the day, any “chicken” approaches have to maintain some separate system for these settings and do their best not to break anything that has been established in SharePoint.

NewsGator has invested a tremendous amount of effort in integrating with SharePoint over the last few years, and, hopefully, the examples above help make the value of that integration more clear.  If nothing else, just remember everyone is else is a chicken and NewsGator Social Sites is a pig.  We’re committed.