Enterprise Social Computing Behind the Firewall - Seminar Wrap Up

On Thursday, May 14, 2009, non~linear creations (NLC) hosted a breakfast seminar jointly with Microsoft on Enterprise Social Computing & Sharepoint. Over 20 people attended from a variety of industries to gather insights and see a demonstration of NLC capabilities in delivering exceptional solutions around Enterprise Social Computing in SharePoint.

The seminar started off with a video call  “Did You Know?”

Enterprise Social Computing is all the rage in the world of intranets and portals. The rise of blogs and wikis on the Web has prompted several high-profile clients organizations to put these and other social tools to use behind the firewall, while many more are wondering whether to jump on the bandwagon.

Enterprise Social Computing has quickly evolved from a mysterious toy of the world’s youth to a mainstream productivity platform.

Here is the powerpoint presentation from the seminar.

As we’ve learned from the massive rise in user-driven social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter over the past few years, harnessing the power of the network offers compelling opportunities to better capture and use information and knowledge—essentially, making it easier for people to take action. These lessons from outside the firewall can and should be applied to the corporation. But where to begin? How to go about it?

In the whitepaper “Enterprise Social Computing and the Imperative of Participation,” the first in a series of conversations with Shannon Ryan, we look at the rise of social computing and some of the compelling factors that will drive corporate adoption, outlining:

The three main advantages of social computing in the enterprise

1. How to make an informed decision about a social computing platform
2. The relationship between corporate culture and your social computing approach
3. Approaches to Enterprise Social Computing and how to manage expectations

This new publication is available for download at:
http://www.nonlinearcreations.com/enterprise-social-computing

Some of the audience were interested in hearing more case studies on the power of Enterprise Social Computing behind the firewall.  Here is a video case study on “Best Buy” and its success.

Below are some key take-aways from the seminar.

When building a strategy, ensure you apply the 8 Pillars of Enterprise Social Computing behind the Firewall.

1. Identity
2. Relationships
3. User experience
4. Sharing
5. Discovery
6. Presence
7. Conversations
8. Reputation

NLC has an established track record for delivering business efficiencies through advanced Enterprise Web solutions, including collaboration systems. We realize social computing may seem like a radical shift from the traditional corporate collaboration tools, but it is actually a natural evolution of those systems. Social computing presents new risks to the enterprise, including concerns about confidentiality, proprietary information, moderation, regulation of competition and personal information.

With our knowledge & experience of both new and old in this paradigm, NLC is uniquely positioned to consult and deliver corporate enterprise social computing solutions within Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007.

If you are interested in finding out more details about NLC’s offerings, assessments, and quickstarts around Enterprise Social Computing, simply email sibbotson@nonlinear.ca

Benefits of Social Computing behind the Firewall with SharePoint:

Enhance collaboration with communities:

• Instantly and easily create communities around projects, establishing work divisions and activities
• Engage in rich discussions and create or share documents with your community members
• Keep up-to-date on your community’s latest news and activities via tags, relevance data and RSS feeds
• Discover communities via search, pre-set lists and recommendations based on your reading activity and social network

Discover experts, peers, & information with corporate social networking:

• View a graphical display of your social network based on explicit and implied connections with others
• Get recommendations for additional connections based on common content, tags and interests
• Subscribe to “follow” an expert
• See top tags, favourite subscriptions, saved stories, and recently posted content on profile pages to quickly understand a user’s interests and expertise
• Perform federated searches for easy discovery of communities, people, content and tags within SharePoint
• Rate content and easily view the most popular articles and authors
• Track colleague activity streams with robust “activity views” within SharePoint (documents, tags, communities, etc) and outside of SharePoint (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.)

Make SharePoint a “Web 2.0” experience:

• Mini-profiles for any user
• Bring fresh, relevant news into any site to increase user adoption
• Tagging (public & private) and tag clouds for any site
• Follow colleague postings and status changes with the News Feed
• Discover new, popular content
• See all feeds from SharePoint in one place—subscribe with a single click and route updates to mobile devices or pop-up notifiers

Measure the business value of your social computing solution with extensive reporting:

• Access hundreds of data views for insights into users, groups, communities, tags and feed activity
• Export reports for use with Excel or any other reporting engine
• Share dashboard views for quick access to critical business metrics

Accelerate Employee Productivity

• Help new, transferred or newly promoted employees to shorten their on-boarding time
• Use pop-up wizards to expedite a new user’s ability to create profiles, find communities and connect with colleagues
• Recommend tags (keywords) for employee profiles to easily locate subject matter experts