8 Ways to Extend SharePoint’s Social Computing

Enterprise 2.0 is becoming a big part of every organizations strategy to work better, smarter, and faster. You probably are aware that SharePoint is a great fit for most organizations document management and collaboration needs. What about social computing?

SharePoint gives you a good starting point. It introduces you to the important concepts and helps you understand how social computing can make your company run better.

But what are your options for a large scale social computing strategy and what do you do when SharePoint falls short? Here are 8 ways companies can extend SharePoint's out-of-the-box capabilities to better fit their social computing vision.

I. My Sites in SharePoint
My Sites in SharePoint encourage interaction among employees and offers a very basic, but corporate equivalent to a Facebook profile. Through a My Site home page employees can communicate their project information, share documents, and discuss mutual interests. They can utilize web parts to display content such as RSS feeds and blog posts. The My Sites Profile lets employees learn about each other's interests and expertise in a glorified digital business card format. Information about colleagues' skill sets can be accessed through SharePoint's people search. Overall it is the perfect way to establish SharePoint as the primary platform to interact with coworkers and team members.

Make My Sites More Engaging
SharePoint's My Site can also be pretty underwhelming and stale for the avid Facebook user. To make it a viable social computing tool, you'll need to extend past their out-of-the-box limitations. Consider installing third party products like nGage by OI Software. nGage installs over your existing SharePoint portal giving corporate My Sites a real WOW factor such as a visual "reputation", scoring user contribution using criteria such as their openness, how they field questions for other users, and how often they contribute documents to SharePoint. It even gives their coworkers a chance to grade their contributions.

II. SharePoint Team Sites
Increasing collaboration among project teams is critical in any organization. SharePoint Team Sites provide a centralized collaboration tool to manage teams and projects. Team Sites include basic document management tools such as document libraries, lists, group calendars, tasks, contacts, and announcements.

Know What Team Members are Doing with Kiiro
Frustrated because you know what Seinfeld rerun your Aunt is watching at the moment based on her Facebook page but have no clue what task your fellow team member is on?

Check out how Kiiro collaboration software extends the basic SharePoint team site to allow Twitter-like status notes by team members giving instant updates as well as an impressive "Who's on What" type of dashboard.

III. SharePoint Blogs
On the web, blogs can be a top source for up to date expertise from subject matter experts.

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