Webinar Follow-Up: Q&A Blog with Emily Staresina of Stockland

In our recent webinar with Emily Staresina of Stockland, she discussed the business drivers that triggered Stockland to begin their enterprise social networking journey, the technology solution they chose, the key lessons they learned, the success they have seen so far, and the next steps for the company.

With all of the great information she covered, we were not able to get to all of the audience questions during the webinar. Emily was happy to address the remaining questions in this follow-up blog.

If you missed it, click here to check out the full on-demand webinar now!

Q: Could you explain in more detail how you integrated SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites 2010 to avoid double-up?

Emily: One word: POC. We had some pilot groups during the Proof-of-Concept (POC) phase using real content and they pointed out much of the duplication, especially around features such as “like” and “ratings.”  We decided to go with the one that would be most prominent. This was a no brainer – the “like” functionality in the NewsGator activity feed had the same look and function as in other standard social tools such as Facebook, making it more intuitive for users. Additionally, through our pilot groups and research program analysis, we ran a number of scenarios around following colleagues and communities and found some holes while on that journey. So again we looked at what others were doing in that space and configured our user experience in the same way. Why reinvent the wheel?

Q: You mentioned SharePoint 2007, what was it used for historically and how has its content been blended into your new SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator infrastructure? 

Emily: SharePoint 2007 was the platform we used to host all intranet content. Overall, the migration of content from 2007 to 2010 wasn’t a problem. We ran into issues with some webparts (we were using the RadEditor in 2007) where the content had to be recreated in 2010 using the Content Editor webpart.  We also changed the resolution of the intranet, which caused some sizing issues. But again, that was easy enough to overcome. I would recommend having your SharePoint developers/admins and any designers work closely together to ensure no gaps are left uncovered in the migration phase.

Q: Does Stockland use a mobile delivery platform for social and collaboration? If so, how? 

Emily: Yes, we launched with the NewsGator mobile app (which is live) but haven’t had much success with it because Stockland’s internal security policy prevents us from housing the community content and employee images outside our firewalls. Our employees do want a mobile solution, so we’re working with our internal IT teams to deliver a robust mobile platform for the social capabilities we’ve delivered. It is a high priority for the company. NewsGator is also working on innovative methods of simplifying mobile device access to SharePoint.

Q: Did you expect more than 350 profiles completed within the first 6 months? Do you know why people are not using the system yet? 

Emily: Good question. Truth be told, we didn’t hold ourselves to a specific number, although we did hope for a 30% completion rate within this time period. People need to see the value in putting their details in, and that can only be achieved when they themselves get a useful result – the whole chicken and egg thing. We recently ran a survey asking why people haven’t filled out their profiles, and the results were that 20% didn’t know about it, 32% didn’t see the value in it, and 47% haven’t had the time to do it yet. This highlights more than ever why it’s so important to continue campaigning for adoption and awareness post launch.

Thank you for taking the time to address these questions, Emily. And thank you again for sharing Stockland’s social journey during our recent webinar!