Socializing SharePoint

NewsGator has released Social Sites 2.0, which it describes as a major upgrade for its social computing solution for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

NewsGator further claims Social Sites and Office SharePoint Server 2007 deliver enterprise-class social computing capabilities that enable businesses to build communities and internal social networks while leveraging existing IT investments and maintaining appropriate security. Social Sites 2.0 is said to integrate seamlessly with Office SharePoint Server 2007 to add value to its social computing features with collaboration tools, enhanced tagging, RSS feed subscriptions and management, colleague tracking features and content mashup capabilities.

The new version of Social Sites:

• allows employees to easily share ideas, information and documents by enabling them to create ad hoc communities around common interests, areas of research, projects, etc.;
• provides for easy discovery of groups via customized recommendations, tag clouds, search and lists of recently created and popular communities;
• offers a discussion component that includes rich e-mail integration, which allows users to participate in a community without ever logging in to the site;
• simplifies content additions by allowing content to be tagged into the community, added via social bookmarks and RSS feeds, or uploaded to a community document store;
• offers chronological views of community activity from both a single community and consolidated from all communities to which a user belongs;
• provides employees with social network graphs based on both explicit and implied connections, making discovery of content and colleagues easier;
• shows each user his or her strongest connections based on common content, interests and intranet activity; and
• recommends colleagues to a user based on common community membership, tags and RSS subscriptions.