Enterprise 2.0 Offerings that Integrate with SharePoint Technology

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.

Why SharePoint?

If there's one thing that any I.T. pro knows, it's the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use or services they've signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered and -- if worthy -- purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure.

SharePoint is no exception. Deciding to ditch SharePoint when building an Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure would not only be incredibly wasteful, but ridiculous, given how well the two could work together. It should be pointed out that SharePoint isn't just the obvious choice for Enterprise 2.0 software because it's the Microsoft server product most commonly used by businesses worldwide, thus making new software purchases and installation unnecessary.

Business leaders interested in building an Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure within their companies need to keep an eye out for a few specific qualities in order to truly reap the benefits of the social software. According to many experts, these qualities should be inclusive of the following: Bottoms up, an organic structure, standards compliance and mash ups.

This is where Microsoft comes in; the SharePoint platform comes equipped with many of these necessary criteria, thus making the union between it and Enterprise 2.0 a match made in heaven that has nothing to do with sticking with SharePoint out of financial obligation. Just how perfectly do they match up? Let's take a look.

"Bottoms up" essentially refers to giving more power to the people using the software, which is a very Enterprise 2.0-related concept. One of the core features of SharePoint is its ability to delegate site administration to the users, thus reducing IT administration tasks and empowering users.

SharePoint also seems to be more than okay with utilizing an organic structure. Through administration delegation, users of SharePoint are able to build countless sites and sub sites, and all of these sits may embody a wiki.

In terms of standards compliance, SharePoint and Enterprise 2.0 don't fit perfectly quite yet because SharePoint is not yet fully XHTML/CSS compliant (thought it is possible), but the platform now works flawlessly in Firefox and Safari -- which is a step in the right direction.

Now, for the final illustration as to why SharePoint and Enterprise 2.0 make as much sense together as peanut butter and jelly: mash ups. SharePoint provides an RSS feed for each list, news and document library and it's also capable of displaying aggregated feeds through a dedicated web part. SharePoint is known for its ability to mash up with other business applications, thus making it the perfect pairing for Enterprise 2.0 software.

Today more than ever, CEOs are asking their CIOs and IT organizations to play a bigger role in the company's growth initiatives by providing tools to enhance collaboration and foster dynamic communication across departments, ultimately to engage more customers and bring more goods and services to market. Using rich blog, wiki, RSS, mash up and social-networking solutions combined with the enterprise content management and search capabilities of SharePoint, SharePoint customers are well positioned to create a competitive advantage in good or bad economic times by leveraging the benefits of Enterprise 2.0.

New software is constantly being developed and changing the way business operates. Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, always seems ahead of the game. Which is why it should come as no surprise that it's chosen to implement an Enterprise 2.0 solution that provides a comprehensive business platform combining traditional collaboration solutions with newer social-computing technologies in an enterprise environment.

Conclusion

The chemistry between Enterprise 2.0 software and Microsoft's SharePoint platform is not something that would have gone unnoticed for long. For many companies, SharePoint is the portal for all their business data -- and not just docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, but also browser-based forms that interact with built-in workflow technologies which add business logic to sophisticated online applications.

Other tools allow for the addition of business intelligence enabled dashboards and reporting centers, enterprise search and application templates that can be downloaded and customized to quickly set up internal web sites and services that provide everything: online help desks, group board workspaces, knowledge libraries, vacation scheduling tools, project tracking workspaces, sales pipelines and much more. Businesses know and trust Microsoft, specifically SharePoint, and chances are they are more than a little hesitant when it comes to the idea of ditching SharePoint -- which would be very costly and inconvenient -- in order to run to the newest Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

That being said, all signs indicate that businesses are very interested in running Enterprise 2.0 applications, and thankfully for Microsoft, they seem more than happy to maximize their investment in SharePoint in order to do so.

Microsoft is surely benefiting from this collaboration, but social software makers such as Awareness are also taking full advantage of what SharePoint has to offer. As recently as a few months ago, Awareness announced their new platform allows for the creation of Web 2.0 communities that connect people and content through social networking technologies and Awareness-powered widgets that can be ported to any third-party services from Facebook to MySpace.

With this new platform from Awareness, Microsoft SharePoint integration is built-in, letting I.T. administrators use SharePoint's scalable and searchable back end to tie together internally-facing SharePoint environments with externally-facing social networking/Web 2.0 communities. This integration also includes the packaging of Awareness's Web 2.0 widgets as SharePoint Web Parts that let users monitor and contribute content, display user details and status, search content and view metrics. Awareness also integrates with SharePoint's Identity Management to allow for single sign-on (SSO), which makes using both platforms together a seamless experience.

For those who thought that Microsoft couldn't possibly see an influx of even more loyal devotees, think again. It seems inevitable that Microsoft's SharePoint will see an even larger spike in popularity as more and more vendors demonstrate their social-computing business tools to new businesses by integrating them with SharePoint technologies. So, on the off chance that a new business interested in social software wasn't already using Microsoft's SharePoint, they will be now. There's still no telling how much more ingrained social software will be in Microsoft's SharePoint, we'll just have to wait and see.