NewsGator enriches corporate social learning with new social business application

CHICAGO, Oct. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- NewsGator today announced a new social learning offering for its Social Sites solution that taps the power of social technology to accelerate training, improve productivity, and make employees happier, among many other benefits.

Social Sites Enrich helps companies create more agile and adaptive workforces using social learning capabilities that deliver information in a more natural, effective manner than tradition formal learning programs. Designed to appeal to the way people like to learn at work, Enrich enables in-the-moment social learning between colleagues, which leads to better information retention as they learn from experience while performing their jobs.

"Enrich helps employees learn faster and easier by creating a persistent, socially interactive learning culture inside the company. It makes the entire organization much more responsive to changing business challenges," said Yvette Cameron, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, Inc. "The best learning comes from the shared knowledge and experience of our peers. Enrich unleashes that knowledge in a natural way that is easily consumed when and where people need it, in the context of their daily business workflows."

Enrich makes it easy and rewarding for people to create, find and share knowledge to solve business problems. It also gives employees more control over building their own skills and competencies. Among the new Enrich capabilities are dynamic knowledge bases and video scenarios.

Video learning scenarios enable a variety of challenging problems to be explained in a two-part question-and-answer video model that users can interact with at their point of need. Originally requested by and created for the U.S. Military Academy, NewsGator created this interactive feature as a place to post, discover, and search valuable peer-created content to enhance learning.

The U.S. Military Academy in West Point, NY uses these interactive video scenarios to develop future Army officers. The program, called Leader Challenge, features the most challenging experiences officers are facing in combat and brings those experiences into the curriculum at West Point through interactive engagement.

Because knowledge is being continuously generated as users collaborate and solve problems, Enrich makes it easy to capture that learning in a dynamic knowledge base. A place to post, discover and search valuable peer-created content to enhance learning, the knowledge base lets users create useful articles, add meaningful metadata to make it more "discoverable," and provide answers to frequently asked questions, among many other capabilities.

Unlike talent management applications that aren't purpose-built for social networking and collaboration, NewsGator Social Sites provides a full suite of enterprise social capabilities to support all lines of business in a new way to get work done while showing immediate value to the business every day. For example:

• A new sales manager tasked with improving sales effectiveness can quickly and easily learn and act, starting with rapid onboarding aided by system recommendations on the people, communities and content to follow. Sales team members are engaged and trained through interactive Q&A and video learning scenarios; experts are encouraged to contribute knowledge and success tips through badging and recognition initiatives; and expertise is readily accessible for an improved sales lifecycle through intuitive visualizations of community members and highly ranked and intelligent routing of contextual information.
• A customer support representative working to resolve a complex problem for a customer is quickly able to find internal expertise on the subject, to collaborate online around the issue, and respond back to the customer. The online conversation and problem solving is saved to the knowledge base where others can use its learning for their own customers. Learning continues as online discussions continue around the issue, refining knowledge on the topic.
• A field technician needing to train his broadly dispersed team on a complex process where "watch and learn" is preferred can create a short video directly from his mobile device, stopping at a critical decision point. A second video showing proper completion of the scenario is just as easily captured. Uploading the two videos along with a title and question creates a new video learning scenario, easily accessed by his team and others on any device. Learners can also see the responses of others and continue the online training collaboration to improve understanding.
• A marketing manager launching a new product introduction across the organization drives engagement and feedback by running online polls and awarding badges for active participation. Sales scenarios and responses to objectives are modeled in a series of video learning scenarios. Each department can create and exchange knowledge around sales and support of the new product, with best practices stored in the searchable, social knowledge exchange, which can span the full company or be limited to a specific team.

"With Enrich, we are disrupting the traditional approach found in current human capital management (HCM) software," said Melissa Risteff, SVP, global marketing and alliances, NewsGator. "Rather than transactions and administration, Enrich puts the focus on employee engagement and development, allowing them to learn more effectively and efficiently," said Risteff. 

Enrich is available immediately as an add-on module for NewsGator Social Sites v3.0.

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About NewsGator
NewsGator is helping over four million paid users in industries across the globe propel the future of productivity. NewsGator Social Sites delivers robust social technology to the enterprise with proven scalability and security to flagship clients like Accenture, Adidas, Deloitte, Ericsson, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Merck & Co., Unisys Corporation, and the US Army. NewsGator delivers advanced social computing capabilities to Microsoft productivity and collaboration platforms, including SharePoint, Windows 8 tablets, SQL, Azure, Windows Phone 7, Lync, Office 365 and Dynamics and was honored as Microsoft's 2011 U.S. Partner of the Year and, more recently, a Globally Managed Partner. Follow us on Twitter @newsgator and at www.newsgator.com

SOURCE NewsGator