A collaboration cornucopia

NewsGator has released the latest version of its enterprise social computing platform, Social Sites 3.0, which offers new capabilities for tracking colleagues’ status, streamlining cross-community knowledge sharing and discovering in-house subject matter experts. Built into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, these features help NewsGator Social Sites transform content, activity and connections into social knowledge for business.

NewsGator says the new microblogging component in Social Sites 3.0 lets users post short, quick Twitter-style status updates to their colleagues. These updates serve as a way to report urgent developments, train colleagues on the fly, identify helpful experts, chronicle off-site conferences, mentor/get mentored, float new ideas, build morale and otherwise harness the value of “weak ties,” says NewsGator.

NewsGator highlights these other business social computing capabilities:

“SocialPedia”—a self-assembling, Wikipedia-style knowledgebase pulls from wikis across SharePoint. SocialPedia enhances Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007’s wiki experience, with AJAX editing, tagging, rating, automated table of contents creation, custom wiki tags and more, creating a single knowledge repository with distributed ownership.

Knowledge Explorer—all visualization of internal experts clustered around concepts with this graphical expertise map. When users click on a topic in a tag cloud, the map appears with experts arranged according to their automatically calculated expertise ratings.