Great Eight Countdown -- #3!

Microsoft launches SharePoint 2010 on May 12. And NewsGator is counting down the weeks with a rundown of SharePoint's new features...plus the "great eight" ways that NewsGator Social Sites goes above and beyond SharePoint 2010 to make your organization truly social. (Truth be told, we've been making SharePoint organizations social for years. Ask 2.1 million NewsGator Social Sites users.)

Here's #3 (remember, we're counting backwards)

Activity Stream
SharePoint 2010 has extended the colleague tracker concept from MOSS 2007 quite substantially.  It produces a Newsfeed, or activity stream, that displays events from your colleagues such as birthdays/anniversaries, peer connections, community assignments, profile modifications or blog posts.  Users can also specify tags they want to monitor, and items with those tags are automatically included in the Newsfeed. 

NewsGator Social Sites 2010 integrates natively with the SharePoint 2010 activity store and extends the capabilities in several very significant ways.  First, it gathers farm more events including document additions, wiki creation, people joining communities, discussions, new ideas, microblogging, votes, comments and more.   Second, it gathers events that come from communities without requiring you to add each member as a colleague.  If a new employee joins my Product Management Community and votes on an idea, I can see that in my activity stream as well as my email digest. 

Speaking of email, Social Sites not only provides digests but also notifications when others react to your actions or target you with an update – and users can just reply to these emails to add further comments.  The ability to like or comment any item, transform the newsfeed from a report into a communication and collaboration center.  Social Sites provides advanced filtering capabilities like seeing the most popular items or restricting the view to the events from a particular colleague or community. 

The Social Sites activity stream not only exists in SharePoint and email, but it also extends out to rich mobile clients for iPhone and Blackberry and desktop client that lets users monitor and interact regardless of what they have open in their browser.  Users can take pictures or record video on their mobile device which they can share in directly through the rich set of API’s.  Companies are free to use these API’s to integrate other systems with the activity stream giving users one place to see all the most important events.   Lastly, rich reporting capabilities let administrators and community owners truly understand the top users and activities. 

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or just come next week for #2 and #1! Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question, and we may feature it in our next post.