Social Intranets the Microsoft Way

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled series on SharePoint Careers to direct you to a series my colleague, Mark Polly, is writing on Social Intranets.  It’s definitely worth checking out, and a higher-level take on a subject we’ve explored in this space many times over– a good companion piece to everything we’ve published (and will continue to write) on Intranets, SharePoint 2013 and Yammer.
Of course, while Mark is looking at things from a “technology agnostic” perspective, I have no real need or desire to be agnostic.  I’m a homer for Microsoft technologies, so where Mark is listing a few dozen different technologies that make up and enable a portal, I see the three or four tightly-integrated Microsoft products that make up a (ahem) best-in-class social intranet ecosystem.  (And yes, that’s this author’s very personal opinion, but I do think it’s justified!)
So let’s take a quick look at Mark’s posts– where he reviews enabling technologies that integrate with social intranets– and supply the Cliff’s Notes for how the Microsoft product stack provides these functions.

The moral of the story is simple.  Everything Mark’s written is true, and if you want to look at each of those technologies separately, you can– but you’re asking for unnecessary complexity.  Microsoft’s solutions– SharePoint, Lync, Yammer– provide a tightly-woven fabric for a social intranet where interaction and connection between people is easy and seamless.  There’s nothing else like it in the market.
And did we mention they do it all in the cloud, too..?