Companies have been using SharePoint as a collaborative platform for years now and today is the leading communication and productivity corporate solution. This Microsoft software, originally designed for the business world, was used as an integrator of productivity tools to create collaborative environments. With more than ten years old, SharePoint is prior to the Web 2.0 phenomenon and all social networks.
The sustained growth of Internet penetration coupled with the rapid adoption and popularity of social networks like Facebook or Twitter and even YouTube, have profoundly changed the habits of use of new technologies by people. Users are now accustomed to friendly interfaces and applications that organizes content with a different approach, where the focus is on activity, popularity or content virality level. These are the values of a digital and social culture.
These changes have a strong impact on the uptake of corporate tools like Intranets, that must play an important social role within an organization to encourage participation and collaboration. These principles of the social and digital culture should be taken into account when designing a collaborative corporate solution.
There are several alternatives to enhance the social capabilities of SharePoint. First, the fact that Yammer was recently acquired from Microsoft confirms that they are very sensitive to these requirements and it is likely that both products will soon be really integrated, maybe as a unique product. But there are other independent companies that are designing social applications specifically for SharePoint. Here we present some of the most popular and useful to be consider.
SharePoint is more social with Yammer
Yammer is defined as "The Enterprise Social Network" and aims to bring the power of social networks to companies. And precisely the promise is that Yammer is as asy to use as Facebook or Twitter, but as a software specially designed for collaboration within a company.
Yammer now integrates with SharePoint allowing access to certain content and features from both platforms and in both directions. Surely Microsoft will incorporate the Yammer social features within SharePoint shortly.
The most popular social tools in SharePoint with Social Attini Suite
Attini has created a collection of templates for SharePoint for adding social functionality to the platform. For example the type of Twitter microbbloging or the ability to post, share and discuss videos in Youtube style. There's a complete set of interesting tools offered by Social Attini Suite.
Community sites with Bamboo SharePoint Central Community
It allows to create a community website on SharePoint easy and fast. The application is completed with forums, blogs and social networking functions common as rankings and ratings for the most active users. Bamboo Community Central can be used to create internal or external SharePoint community sites to centralize business communication with customers or suppliers, for example.
Promoting innovation with SpigitEngage
This application offers a simple and intuitive interface to create an intelligent ranking of ideas in order to help companies to identify an transform the best ideas into concrete initiatives promoting innovation within an organization through collaboration-style Web 2.0. SpigitEngage is built on SharePoint so no integration is needed.
Increase productivity by improving communication with SnapTeam
The idea is to gather information and processes of a company with social functions to increase productivity, assuming that is people, not technology, which carries on a business. SnapTeam promises to improve SharePoint communication capabilities for users within an organization. The application is not available as it is in beta and not open to the public yet.
These are just some chosen initiatives. There are many more available. And each of them can add significant value to create powerful social tools with SharePoint.
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