Everything in one spot – what a great idea!

I’ll never forget when my town got a mall. The little city of International Falls suddenly had the International Mall. While the name wasn’t stunningly original, being able visit one place to do all of your shopping made life a lot easier – especially when you consider that the temperatures in International Falls often dip below -30 degrees Fahrenheit.  In much the same way, NewsGator’s new Idea Stream for Social Sites 2010 delivers ideation functionality to the activity stream inside SharePoint 2010.

This screenshot shows a couple of ideas that I added to my activity stream. Submitting an idea is as easy as clicking the “Post an Idea” tab and typing it in. What’s even more interactive is that I can vote and comment on ideas directly within the stream. I don’t need to go to some other site to participate. 
Unlike the International Mall, however, the stream isn’t only in one place. Not only can I submit ideas and vote and comment from my MySite and Social Sites communities, but I can also participate from my mobile client.

So even if I’m on the road, I can still give my suggestions and support my colleague’s good ideas. And in the theme of having everything in one place, you’ve probably already noticed that my news interests are incorporated on the stream in my iPhone client as well.

Of course, as convenient as it is to participate from the activity stream, there’s more to ideation than just one-liner ideas and voting. Idea Stream has a campaign (or challenge) capability that allows you to easily create a “campaign” site for collecting ideas around a particular business goal. The campaign functionality makes it easy to create a great looking place with filtering, searching, and reporting to let users and admins see all the ideas and how the campaign is progressing. Campaign admins can easily decide what required and optional information is needed to collect for each idea as well as controlling whether ideas require approval. Finally, the campaign flow can be controlled so that ideas can be submitted, discussed, and reviewed in the first phase and then voting can be enabled.

In the screenshot above, you can see our Q4 campaign to get ideas on how to make NewsGator employees even happier. We just launched this campaign, and we already have some really good ideas (and a few ideas that won’t be included in the subsequent voting process…). While employees are required to come to this site to enter new ideas, they can easily follow, vote, and comment on these ideas from anywhere.

The power of the activity stream comes from bringing together the most important information and events in a company and allowing users to easily participate. In the workplace today, users have dozens of tasks and interfaces competing for their attention. With Idea Stream, we’re adding a powerful, yet simple-to-use idea capability to the same activity stream that already handles microblogging, questions and answers, news feeds, and activity tracking. No doubt the International Mall made shopping easier (and warmer), but using Idea Stream to bring together all innovative suggestions from my co-workers with rest of my critical updates is truly…well, a great idea.