NewsGator Enterprise Social Platform Taking SharePoint To The Next Level

At this year’s Share conference which takes place on March 11th-13th, Intervate, an Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solutions specialist and Microsoft Gold Partner for Content Management, Digital Marketing and Portals and Collaboration, will be the power behind the Newsgator and Software Innovation 360 stands.

NewsGator’s Social Sites solution is a leading Enterprise Social offering and is fully compatible with Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Windows 8-ready. The solution is bringing the benefits of the social media phenomenon to the business environment and integrates directly into the SharePoint collaboration platform.

While SharePoint 2013 itself and Microsoft’s recently acquired Yammer cloud platform do offer useful social feature sets for businesses, Newsgator’s offering is targeted at enterprises who are mature in their requirement for high-value advanced social use cases, and have deeply embedded on-premise SharePoint implementations. Customers include Citibank, Barclays, ING and HSBC in financial services, Accenture and Deloitte in consulting, Turkcell and MTN in telecommunications, and Adidas and Oakley in retail.

“It is common knowledge that communication and the sharing of ideas, knowledge and intellectual property (IP) are difficult, but essential to the success of any business. The NewsGator solution enables organisations to streamline communication, improve employee recruiting and retention, and boost overall organisational productivity to their benefit. This alone will set an organisation apart from its competitors and ensure the process of sharing business knowledge and ideas,” says Roy Hobson, Business Development Executive at Intervate.

A key challenge for users in an information-heavy workplace is that there are many streams of content flowing from many different sources. Newsgator starts to aggregate these streams together into a single place to get work done in a “social” way. New to the Social Sites solution is a personalised, universal toolbar, allowing users monitor notifications, initiate new conversations, ask questions, and respond to the items in their activity stream from any SharePoint page or web page. This means that Microsoft Outlook email, calendar and tasks are now brought into the solution, enabling users to do their work in a single centralised and personalised dashboard.

Also integrated in the solution is a secure social media monitoring function which tracks news sites, blogs, wikis, external social streams, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and delivers them directly to a user’s activity stream. Employees are therefore always conscious of industry happenings, conversations and discussions that impact on their business to either contribute to or learn from. They are always in the know and not left behind.

The ‘Getting an Answer’ application allows users to ask and answer questions in real-time within a community and is one of the quickest ways to drive the value of cross-enterprise collaboration.

Fluid real-time and asynchronous conversations can be conducted through the Microsoft Lync integration with the Social Sites solution. It makes on-the-fly instant messaging, as well as audio, and video conversations possible, further prompting the sharing of ideas and increasing organisational communications.

“Understanding that mobility is a necessity for organisations has not been forgotten. ‘Glassboard’ is a free social mobile application integrated in the Newsgator solution that lets users anywhere engage in private group sharing with external stakeholders using their mobile devices,” adds Hobson.

“By integrating Newsgator directly into your SharePoint collaboration deployment it makes your organisation truly social. Companies can focus on delivering value to users and unify technology infrastructure while fully leveraging the SharePoint social network,” concludes Hobson.

For further information about the SharePoint Conference 2013 and Newsgator Social Sites solution stand, contact Talia Farber at [email protected] or visit the Newsgator stand at the SharePoint 2013 Conference, 11 -13 March 2013 at the Sandton Sun, Johannesburg.