Enterprise 2.0 Offerings that Integrate with SharePoint Technology
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It's hard to imagine staid corporations getting on the social networking bandwagon, until you realize the potential for this technology to help with collaboration and make employees more productive. Microsoft is no slouch when it comes to providing businesses with the software capabilities they need. In fact, many of these Enterprise 2.0 functions are already built into SharePoint.
Despite a rapidly changing world and readily available technology that makes anything and everything possible, it still sometimes seems as if the corporate world is lagging behind; remaining stuffy and boring. After all, not many of us can relate our corporate experience back to ultra cool and laid back office environments such as the one at Google.
But there is still hope. More and more businesses are using a new form of social software that is breathing life into the corporate world and revolutionizing the way it communicates internally and with clients. Enter: enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0.
The term "enterprise social software" is a general term for describing software that includes social and networked modifications. Enterprise 2.0 quickly became the more appealing terminology for this type of software, which is now understood to mean social and networked changes to business software.
Similar to the way Web 2.0 sometimes describes the introduction and implementation of Web 2.0 technologies within a business, enterprise social software is a term describing social software used in business contexts. Aside from including the previously mentioned social and networked modifications to company intranets, it has also proven to be very different from traditional enterprise software.
Typically, enterprise software imposes structure prior to use; Enterprise 2.0 software actually encourages use prior to providing structure. It may seem like a slight adjustment, but it is proving to be a major change in the status quo for countless businesses that have chosen to utilize Enterprise 2.0. Essentially all of this is to say that Enterprise 2.0 helps make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Perhaps one of the most obvious reasons as to why Enterprise 2.0 is gaining steam in the corporate world is because of its new-found affiliation with Microsoft Office's SharePoint platform. Looks can be deceiving though; Enterprise 2.0 isn't necessarily riding the coattails of Microsoft's wildly popular software. Microsoft is actually reaping many of the benefits in this new coupling.
Vendors are seeking to broaden Microsoft Office SharePoint's appeal as a social computing platform. Microsoft Office SharePoint server's social computing capabilities out-of-the box are limited to the ability to create personal sites, including blogs, but SharePoint lacks some of the more sophisticated capabilities of many other systems -- though when coupled with Enterprise 2.0, it's an entirely different story.
The use of Enterprise 2.0 broadens the depth and breadth of social computing capabilities that one can integrate into SharePoint, meaning the ability of organizations to leverage SharePoint as a social computing platform is rapidly increasing. This may leave some wondering why it is specifically that the SharePoint platform is finding this business software particularly beneficial. Let's find out.
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