NewsGator hosted a Webinar today on the topic “Enterprise Social Computing with SharePoint – What, Why & How”. Dave from NewsGator is the moderator. Karen is from the product management group at NewsGator.

Agenda:
– What is Social Computing?
– Business Benefits (& Risks) of Social Computing
– Delivering Social Computing with Social Sites and SharePoint
– Q&A

What is Social Computing?
Karen showed a couple of definitions (Forrester, Wikipedia and NewsGator).

Sample applications in consumer space … Hi5, Twitter (microblogging), del.icio.us (social bookmarking)

Sample applications in business space … Citi (have a Facebook network with over 8000 employee members), Siemens (also have a Facebook group, but are concerned about security)

Business Benefits
Why are businesses considering these features?
– You can’t ignore the usage of these tools in the consumer space
– They facilitate collaboration
– Helps people find peers and subject matter experts
– Expands knowledge capture and increases employee knowledge
– Drives innovation

What are the risks?
– Very few business-related functions and features
– Employees don’t want to mix their personal and professional profiles
– Security and privacy concerns
– Difficult to integrate with other internal systems, eg, LDAP or security
– IT support challenges

… so the general gist of this webinar is … social computing tools offer value to the enterprise, but they need to be run on enterprise class software and tools, not consumer grade ones.

Delivering Social Computing with Social Sites and SharePoint
Key features:

– groups and communities

(note the “Recommended Communities” section, for quickly showing people who else has similar interests)

(note the “Leave this community” link, for quickly exiting)

– social networks … eg, a LinkedIn alternative for the enterprise.

(note that the bottom part, on recommended connections, is automatically generated)

– profiles

(note that it shows what he has been doing during the day, among other things)

– news and friends feeds … what friends are up to … the Colleague Tracker in NewsGator:

– social bookmarking … eg, a Digg replacement for auto-ranking and promoting of news.

– news trends … what others are finding useful. Helpful for auto-discovery.

– clipping

Questions and Answers
Question: “Won’t new employees joining firms demand these tools?”
(Karen) They may not demand it, but they will be used to it. They bring a different mindset.

Question: “How do you integrate with SharePoint?”
(Dave) We add in as a value pack. We are a Microsoft partner.

Question: “How do you license Social Sites?”
(Dave) License fee plus user CALs, as per Microsoft.

Question: “How are companies using these tools to build external communities?”
(Karen) Social computing can be used with external people. Seeing work being done in financial services. Often see SharePoint being used for this.