NewsGator digs into social computing

NewsGator today introduced Social Sites 3.0 - significant upgrade to NewsGator's enterprise social computing platform, and to Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in general. Companies can sign up for beta access today to see how Social Sites transforms content, activity and social graphs into "Social Knowledge." NewsGator's Social Sites 3.0 release includes two breakthrough capabilities to organize valuable content and leverage reputation in large organizations:

• Socialpedia - This self-assembling Wikipedia-style internal Web site is a one-stop source of knowledge generated in topic-based online communities throughout the global organization. Socialpedia leverages an improved Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 wiki experience within Social Sites communities to create a single knowledge repository with distributed ownership. A new hire can find terminology to get productive fast. A sales representative can brush up on an arcane product feature to help close the deal. HR can explain complicated concepts just once for all to see.

• Knowledge Explorer - Expertise maps, which take advantage of the rich media features in Microsoft Silverlight, provide an interactive graphical snapshot of the professionals in an organization that are most informed on a selected topic. When users click on a topic in a tag cloud, the map appears with experts arranged according to their automatically calculated expertise ratings. Need an internal expert to talk to a prospect on dual-flange inverted widgets? Click on the "widgets" tag and find her. Looking for the missing link in the potential miracle drug you're developing? Discover your overseas counterpart and get it done. The CEO needs a few slides now on New Zealand go-to-market strategy? Find the guy who knows it backwards and forwards.

These new capabilities will be included as standard features in Social Sites Enterprise which is becoming the default starting point for productivity-minded knowledge workers in large businesses.