NewsGator Announces Social Sites 2.5 for Enterprise Social Computing

NewsGator unveiled a new version of Social Sites, its enterprise social computing solution. Social Sites lets companies activate a "Facebook for the Enterprise". Social Sites 2.5 gives organizations new insights into their enterprise social networks in order to fine-tune them. Through a dashboard, administrators can oversee user, group, tag, community and feed activity with the option of drilling all the way down to the article level. A corporate communications manager, for example, can determine exactly how audiences interact with their messages. Each report can be exported as XML to Microsoft Office Excel or any reporting engine. A new On-Boarding Wizard enables users to quickly associate tags (keywords) with themselves based on their roles and professional focus. These tags enable new users to quickly and automatically forge valuable relationships with the right mix of individuals and communities throughout the enterprise. Social Sites 2.5 includes SharePoint webparts that enable organizations to leverage the SharePoint Search Center to discover communities, people, content and tags established within Social Sites. NewsGator Social Sites also interoperates with any search solution based on the Open Search standard. Social Sites 2.5 enhances organizational awareness by giving users a single, unified view for staying updated on colleagues, communities and SharePoint activity. Social Sites 2.5 captures colleagues' activity in real time as they tag themselves or an article, rate content, report their status, or perform over 20 other types of actions. Users can also subscribe to colleagues' external feeds - from a blog, Twitter, Facebook or any designated source - if the originator wishes to offer the feeds to others. Administrators can determine which activities are trackable. NewsGator Social Sites 2.5, which operates on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables users to create a community discussion around any article, document, or blog post created in SharePoint. Content can be rated on a five-point scale within Social Sites to enhance discovery by other users. In addition, users can privately tag content to prevent conveying sensitive information. http://www.newsgator.com/