Thursday Re-Cap of SharePoint Conference 2011: It's a Wrap

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

Thursday wrapped up a great week at the SharePoint Conference 2011. As I sat at the airport waiting to board my plane home, I came across an article, “Job Listings Prove That Microsoft Still Matters.” The article described how there is a real demand for qualified .Net developers and in particular, Microsoft SharePoint skills are in very high demand! That basically summed up the entire week in Anaheim at #SPC11.

More organizations than ever before are embracing SharePoint beyond simple document collaboration. Companies are doing more and more with the platform. Based on the conversations and crowds at the NewsGator booth, the number of organizations planning and implementing social projects is just exploding. The hunger for social capabilities in the corporate world (and even the private sector) closely parallels the rate of evolution of social features in consumer markets. That leaves us all wondering, where is this “social thing” headed? - a question that came up several times throughout the conference. Fortunately, I was able to get a glimpse of the future from NewsGator President and CEO, JB Holston, and VP of Products, Brian Kellner. Here is what they shared with me:

• JB Holston's view of the future focuses on social intelligence – which he defines as emotional intelligence, but social. He described social intelligence as different than E2.0, which was focused on tools that simply enabled social collaboration. It’s different than social business, which helped us to understand that social is just infrastructure. It's not enough, social will become intelligent. It’s about the ability to have the right conversation at the right time, at the most efficient work point, in the right work context - all focused on what he calls “doing best, next”. The future also involves "always on” collaboration - whomever and whatever you need available on whatever device, whenever, allowing you to do what you need and want to do best, next. The future is one that embraces peer-to-peer social learning and the full lifecycle of social talent management. He says it's all about empowering the individual!
• Brian Kellner talked about a future that involves an increasing scale of information and communication. He referenced NewsGator’s history as an aggregator of large amounts of information and how we are leveraging our years of experience with “big data” to create a future where software provides more and more social intelligence services, filtering, recommendations, and simplicity for users. As the consumer market continues to blend into the corporate market, Brian mentioned how NewsGator’s pace of innovation is a competitive advantage to quickly deliver capabilities and value that rivals the consumer space.

I wanted to share these interesting glimpses into the future with you from my travels at the #SPC11. What was even more interesting was that no one other than NewsGator was talking about the future at the conference… which simply demonstrates NewsGator’s thought leadership and ability to innovate.