Over on our Microsoft Blog, Rich Wood has a post on Planning Communities in Newsgator Sites. I’ll pop in a teaser but Rich does dive deeper. In general though, his best practices are applicable across all social sites. Social tools of all types need to focus on communities as a way to share the information and find the experts.
At Perficient, most of our customers are looking for a SharePoint interface that provides functionality familiar to users who live their lives on Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like. While a number of independent software vendors offer these packages, we work very closely with NewsGator to deliver the feature set that our clients need.
It’s not enough to say “we want our intranet to work like Facebook”, but that’s usually where organizations start, and no wonder—Facebook is intuitive, easy to use, and more or less ubiquitous these days. Of course, businesses who say they want their own Facebook behind the firewall are a lot like people my age who say they like Radiohead—everyone wants to do it, but not many of them really know why.
Happily, a good many forward-thinking companies have already seized the opportunity to deploy a solution like NewsGator’s Social Sites to achieve their ends. Once they’ve had some time to work with us and really build out their vision, it typically boils down to desiring some variation of these three key points. Customers want to:
- Create Engaging Communities
- Find Experts
- Capture Knowledge
I’d like to talk a bit —well, write, really— about these points today.
See his post for the rest
Thanks for the shout-out, Michael!