NewsGator Announces Enhanced Microblogging, Activity Stream and Community Features to Social Sites 2010

DENVER, May 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- NewsGator today announced NewsGator Social Sites 2010 Version 2.0, which introduces important new product developments for organizations using Microsoft SharePoint that want to improve business performance through social computing.

Available today, the new version adds a host of enhancements to the company's flagship social computing suite in these areas:

• Enhanced Microblogging – Users now have additional, enterprise-class microblogging capabilities including the ability to share (i.e., re-Tweet) activities/events in the activity stream, send private messages to counterparts, and flag events/items for later follow-up.

• More Activity Stream Filters – Users can filter their activity stream based on author, published date, hashtag, community, activity type, and contributors using a new Silverlight Web Part based on Microsoft Pivot technology. A Top News filter prioritizes events and microblogs by automatically learning users' preferences based on their behavior. New flexible web parts allow users to choose filtered views based on people, communities, and keywords (hashtags).

• Community Templates – New community template functionality lets central administrators pre-define look, feel, features, and content for new communities. This enables an organization to create a standard project community that differs from the standard community of practice, for example. New tag and hashtag functions improve community discovery and automatic distribution of valuable content.

• Advanced Email Integration – Social Sites 2010 now makes email even more social.  Users can initiate a question or a microblog conversation to the whole organization or any specific community via email. Users can also choose to get notifications for questions and/or microblogs for each community they join. Coupled with the existing ability to reply to email notifications, this new feature allows companies to switch from email distribution lists to rich, collaborative communities while still letting users work from within their email client.

• Architecture – For enhanced performance and scalability, Social Sites 2010 now supports deployment across multiple server farms with a farm-level RAM cache option. Activity streams can now be retained indefinitely with microblogs and questions integrated directly to SharePoint or FAST search, enabling improved knowledge management.

"NewsGator's Social Sites makes a significant difference to our people in terms of productivity, collaboration, and the ability of national teams to work together as virtual communities," said Michele Bleser, director of technology with Slalom, LLC. "For a consulting organization like ours, effective collaboration is a key success factor. Social Sites cuts the time our people were spending aggregating information from multiple Microsoft SharePoint 2010 communities while rewarding them daily with insights into what their colleagues are doing and the latest developments firm wide."

About NewsGator Technologies

NewsGator, a Microsoft Gold-Certified and Depth-Managed Partner, offers award-winning enterprise social computing solutions. Direct integration with SharePoint's business collaboration platform means NewsGator Social Sites runs hassle-free on thousands of organizations' existing computing infrastructures. Capabilities familiar to consumer-oriented social software, such as microblogging, activity streams, social profiles, mobile clients, and expertise location, ensure users extract real business value from collaboration and knowledge management activities. Founded in 2004 and with over 2.5 million paid users, NewsGator serves Fortune 200 and government knowledge workers across the globe – including Accenture, Biogen Idec, Charles Schwab, Deloitte, Edelman, Fujitsu, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Novartis, Unisys Corporation, the United States Air Force, and the United States Army.

Together, SharePoint and Social Sites are propelling the future of productivity - www.newsgator.com.

SOURCE NewsGator