NewsGator Social Sites

Disclaimer: This article is a paid product review. The company behind the product or service described in this article has compensated SharePoint Magazine for having this article available on the site.

This Article was authored by Laura Farrelly:

“Laura Farrelly is currently the Director of Marketing for NewsGator Technologies, Inc.  Laura has nearly 10 years of executive level marketing and product management experience at business-to-business software companies. Laura has a B.S. in Engineering from Michigan Technological University, a M.S. in Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.”

NewsGator Social Sites provides behind-the-firewall social computing and RSS capabilities that enable businesses to deliver “Facebook for the Enterprise”.  Social Sites integrates seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint to provide employees with:

• Social Home/Start Pages – provides users with colleague activity feeds, enables network building, and surfaces relevant content.
• Social Profile Pages – enables expert/colleague location and validation, provides social network graphs, and displays activity streams.
• Communities – allows for easy discovery and creation of ad hoc groups, supports social bookmarking and content sharing, and offers rich discussion and document collaboration capabilities.
• Content Discovery – provides advanced RSS capabilities (feeds, subscriptions, and management), surfaces hot topics and content, and eases content discovery with tagging and tag clouds.

NewsGator Social Sites integrates seamlessly with SharePoint to provide enterprises with secure social computing capabilities that have been designed specifically for business purposes.  The following is a review of some of Social Sites most social features.

• 1) Social Network Graphs – these graphs provide a visual depiction of a person’s closest colleagues along with recommendations for new colleagues. The nice part about this feature is that Social Sites compiles this information automatically based on the actions people are taking within SharePoint. With this feature, people can quickly locate experts or find other people in the organization that are working on similar projects.
  
• 2) Communities – Social Sites enables people to create groups on the fly in order to collaborate around a special interest or project. Non-technical users can create groups with a few simple clicks. Groups can share documents and content and engage in discussions. Communities facilitate collaboration and help businesses improve productivity and innovation.
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• 3) Profile Pages – these pages feature overviews of a person including the content they create in SharePoint, their favorite RSS subscriptions, the tags they use most frequently, their current status, areas of expertise, etc. Profiles make it easy for people to find subject matter experts to assist with problem solving or work projects.
  
• 4) Start Pages - Start pages provide a person with a personalized portal experience. Users can track their colleague’s portal activity including blog posts, document additions, discussion threads, etc. Relevant content is automatically surfaced for the user based on their portal activities. Users can track colleagues’ current status and even update their own status. Personalized tag clouds can be added to the start page such that the user has quick access to their most important content. Users can set up a personalized RSS reader with their favorite feeds. And the system even suggests new colleagues to a user based on people’s activity in the portal.
• 5) Community Discovery – Social Sites makes it easy to discover relevant groups and communities within SharePoint. Social Sites recommends communities based on colleagues who are already members, as well as similar tags, read content, subscriptions and activities. Social Sites also provides for easy discovery of groups via tags, search, and lists of recently created communities.
• 6) Social Bookmarks - This feature allows users to tag any URL or web content and automatically save it to a community, their profile, or other SharePoint locations.

“Newsgator has a terrific front end to SharePoint. Check it out if you’re considering SharePoint for SN/Collab.” Susan Scrupski, IT Insider, Twitter Update, June 11, 2008.

• “You perhaps are familiar with Newsgator as an RSS aggregator. Earlier this year we wrote about its social platform built on top of Microsoft SharePoint. Newsgator was showing its newest release of the software and we remain impressed with the approach. Many vendors are trying to deliver ‘Facebook for the Enterprise.’ Newsgator is one of the best.” Jonathan Yarmis, Fanning the Flames of Enterprise 2.0, June 13, 2008.
• Universal McCann Launches Intranet 2.0, Adopts Social Networking Platform, Joe Mandese, Media Post, Jun 10, 2008.
• Microsoft, Other Firms Take Aim at Enterprise 2.0 Market with New Tools, By Heather Havenstein, ComputerWorld, June 9, 2008.

Company Details:

Company Name: NewsGator
Company URL: www.NewsGator.com
Product URL: www.newsgator.com/Business/SocialSites
Product Video: http://www.newsgator.com/Business/SocialSites/Video/SocialSites_Viddler.aspx
Pricing: Pricing and licensing for Social Sites is based on a one-time, per-user license fee that scales based on number of users.  Yearly support is charged as a percentage of the license fee.