NewsGator's "Don't Fight Social Technology, Harness It" Webinar Recap

As Microsoft’s Partner of the Year in 2010, Slalom Consulting knows from firsthand use the power of SharePoint as a pervasive collaboration platform for any business. Its expansion into enterprise social, however, has been more gradual, prompted by the growing social networking demands of its diverse employee population. In our most recent webinar, Don’t Fight Social Technology: Harness it, Internal SharePoint Architect, Michael Cierkowski, and Slalom’s National Solutions Architect Tim Tisdale, take a close look at how Slalom Consulting works and discuss how it uses social technology internally to leverage its existing SharePoint environment.

Watch the short video excerpt below or read on to learn more about how Slalom Consulting is leveraging SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites to fuel internal collaboration.



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Who is Slalom?
Slalom is a national business and technology consulting firm, with diverse practice areas including business management, organization effectiveness, technology enablement, and information management. Founded in 2001, Slalom has over 1,200 employed consultants working across multiple regions, making it an ideal candidate for internal collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Making the decision
Over the years, the largely one-way push of the traditional Internet has given way to a two-way, highly interactive environment in which information sharing occurs on a larger scale and in a highly collaborative space. As sharing increases exponentially and the limits of email as a collaborative tool become glaringly apparent, workers and organizations are embracing new social computing techniques that streamline internal processes while improving communication.

Like many companies, Slalom saw this evolution manifest in the form of knowledge workers communicating with one another using third-party social tools like Yammer and Twitter. Acknowledging the inevitability, and likely benefits of going social, the company began to look for the ideal social platform to offer employees— one that was easy-to-use and increased overall productivity.

Taking Action
To create its ideal platform, Slalom partnered with NewsGator, Microsoft’s 2011 United States Partner of the Year. NewsGator’s Social Sites is the only social computing solution built directly on top of SharePoint. Choosing Social Sites for its social shift gave Slalom an easy way to access advanced social media collaboration capabilities, but within the safe, manageable and familiar infrastructure of its SharePoint 2010 environment. 

New Capabilities
Slalom has used NewsGator to dramatically enhance its existing SharePoint deployment with comprehensive social tools including microblogging, communities, social profiles, mobile clients, badging, recognition, expertise location, and analytics.
And Slalom is continuing to push the boundaries of its social enterprise, with plans to launch Social Sites’ Video Stream and News Stream value-add modules in the near future!

Learning and Evolving
We are proud to report that Slalom is already realizing business benefits from the Social Sites platform! They say numbers don’t lie and Slalom’s are impressive. After rolling out Social Sites, Slalom has seen 214 communities created since last March, with over 7,000 subscriptions activated across hundreds of communities! Looking at trends beyond the numbers, Slalom has seen a surge in community microblogging, increased use of notifications on peer activities, and a spike in subscription activities versus infrequent browsing. Just as we’ve seen with other social enterprise converts, we’re sure that Slalom will continue to learn and evolve in its use of NewsGator to boost the engagement and productivity of its employees.

To learn more about how Slalom Consulting is using social technologies, and seeing real business benefits, please check out our informative webinar. Together, Slalom and NewsGator, the only two Microsoft’s United States Partner of the Year award winners, are proving that the future of work is social and that future is here now!