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8/18/2009

Accenture Success Story

Accenture is one of the world’s largest global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. As a professional services firm with employees spread across multiple geographies covering a wide span of expertise skills, Accenture needed the right solution to help the employees collaborate and communicate effectively, leveraging their broad network and knowledge as resources for their clients. Even before the launch of SharePoint 2007, Accenture has been an early adopter of social computing technologies. The CIO organization within Accenture helped drive their internal social networking solution, Accenture People, to deployment and adoption.

Watch the Accenture video case study to find out why they chose SharePoint, how they delivered the solution to their end users, and what benefits they achieve as a result of using SharePoint for social computing.

7/14/2009

Windows Live Writer as a SharePoint Blog Editor

Yesterday at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) and on Sneak Peek of SharePoint 2010 site we began to disclose some exciting SharePoint 2010 features. As excited as I am for all of the features in the Overview Video I want to share a way to enhance your blogging experience in the current version of SharePoint.

Burton Analyst Mike Gotta has been saying for awhile that we should talk more about Windows Live Writer as an editing and publishing tool for SharePoint blogs in addition to our standard mention of Word as a publishing tool. We aren’t the first to show you how to setup Windows Live Writer for Sharepoint, but here’s a refresher as well as some suggested plug-ins for Windows Live Writer.

Download Windows Live Writer from http://download.live.com/writer if you don’t already have it installed and launch the program.
Click Tools > Add blog Account..
Select the type of weblog you would like to add. In this case select SharePoint blog and click next.
Type or copy/paste the URL of your blog in the provided box and click next. I’ve put the URL for my internal My Site blog.
If you would like to have your blog’s themes and layout shown within Windows Live Writer then select yes at the next prompt. This provides a much richer preview experience in Windows Live Writer because you will see exactly how your post will appear on your blog including theme and layout. Don’t worry about the temporary post showing up in RSS readers or a twitterfeed. These typically use a pull method that looks for updates on the blog at periodic intervals and the temporary post is published for only a few seconds.
After the setting have been detected you are given the chance to give the blog account a nickname. I called mine simply ‘My Site Blog’ to distinguish it from my personal blog for which I also use Windows Live Writer.
Your blog is all setup! You can edit as a rich text WYSIWYG editor, preview what it will look like published with your site theme, and directly edit the HTML source by using the tabs at the bottom of the editing pane.
Use the default options under Insert to include links, pictures, maps, and tags in your SharePoint blog post. Including a video through Windows Live Writer will post a still image of the video as a link to the video source.
When you’re finished with your blog post set categories using existing ones pulled from your blog or by adding new ones, then hit Publish or Save draft.
You’ll notice in the step 8 image the ability to add a plug-in. Here are links to my favorite plug-ins from the Windows Live Gallery:
Flickr Upload and FacebookPhotos for images
Event Plugin
Social Bookmarking Tags or more specifically DiggThis to invite social feedback
Insert File Plugin to share files within a blog post
Twitter Notify to share your new post through Twitter

6/23/2009

New white paper now available: Social Computing in the Enterprise

Just in time for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, we have released a brand new white paper which discusses Microsoft's position on the vision and value of social computing for enterprises. It makes extensive use of actual customer and Microsoft examples to illustrate how you can evolve collaboration within your organization by putting a suit and tie on the new wave of Web 2.0 tools.

You can download it now, and check out our selection of other white papers on social computing over in the Resources area.

6/22/2009

Coca-Cola Enterprises Moves Toward E2.0 in the Cloud

Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), the world's largest marketer, producer and distributor of Coca-Cola products has not only made the move to the SharePoint, they've moved to SharePoint in the Cloud! CCE is using our Microsoft Online Services to provide a complete portal, social collaboration, and communications solution for over 30,000 employees worldwide. And, CCE plans to expand the rollout to more than 40,000 deskless employees who work in warehouses and moving between stores.

This case study is brand new. You can find both written and video versions here.

I think one of the key points the CCE executives make is that an intranet can be a lively place of employee interaction, not simply a top-down information sharing system. As Lauren Sayeski, CCE's Public Affairs and Communications Manager says, "“We focused on ways for employees to comment back to the organization as well as communicate with each other. Now we have the ability to post comments on the intranet and create team sites. We’re finding that employees are talking to each other and using each other’s resources, sharing knowledge. We launched our first CEO blog last year and in the first five minutes had more than 40 responses back. That’s just the beginning..."

Sometimes in the rush toward Enterprise 2.0 it can be forgotten that many of the tools already in the IT toolbox, like SharePoint, can foster interaction and collaboration quite well. CCE for example had over 800 Team Sites created in just the first four weeks. All that, and cloud service too.

If you are interested in exploring our SharePoint Online offering, please visit here.

6/21/2009

Electronic Arts Success Story

Over the last few months it has been our privilege to get to know Bert Sandie and Erin Browes of Electronic Arts. EA is of course the largest dedicated electronic gaming company in the world. Bert and Erin and their virtual team at EA have long been passionate believers in social computing and collaboration tools to help EA develop better games faster. With the escalating costs of video game development, the rise of new technical platforms such as new consoles, mobile phones, and social gaming networks, as well as stiff competition for the top talent in software and art, it is no wonder EA is leading the way in mining social software for all it's worth. It has helped EA in learning and development, building a social fabric, and finding and connecting the best resources to create great products.

EA being the creative place it is, theirs is not your father's social network. Check out the EA video case study in Successes to see their story. Bert will be speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston as part of a social computing customer panel we're hosting-- see www.e2conf.com.

If you have feedback or would like to hear more from Bert, let us know by replying to this post with a comment (Live ID sign in required.)

6/17/2009

Washington State University Success Story

Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, WA uses SharePoint My Sites as a social network for learning to connect students, faculty, and even alumni. They've run an innovative contest called ePortfolio for students where the students create and publish workspaces that showcase their learning over time using multimedia evidence. This gives students a way to gain recognition and collaborators for their work and prepares them for the technology-driven workplace of today. The contest also encouraged both creation and browsing-- leading other students to discover interesting and innovative work going on around campus and the world.

We have a short video case study here that lets you hear the voices of WSU. The university has extended the ePortfolio concept to faculty and programs as well. In fact, you can browse some of the actual ePortfolios and the evolution of the concept here on the WSU website.

Think about the learning, mentoring, and sharing of reputation and skills that an ePortfolio could enable within your organization.

Enjoy!

6/16/2009

Universal McCann & NewsGator Success Story

Now up on the site is a video case study from Universal McCann, a global media communications agency. Their executives talk about how they came to adopt social software and how they've made it work.

Their story covers many of the points we see with other customers. First, the Facebook Experiment caused them to take a serious look at enterprise social software. Their desire to "connect the dots" among their offices and employees around the globe is something we hear frequently.

Second, they really adapted the look and feel of the solution to the culture of the organization. While you can start very bare bones with social software, if you really want to build identity and scoial fabric, you need to make it customized by the group and the individuals.

Third, they had a good partner to help along the way. In this case, the partner was NewsGator. NewsGator started as (and still is) an enterprise newsfeed vendor who over the last few years has also become an ISV of community software for SharePoint called Social Sites. NewsGator does great work and has helped many of our mutual customers get even more out of SharePoint.

Enjoy!

6/15/2009

The Facebook Experiment

There's no question that the rise of social networking sites on the consumer Internet, such as Facebook, are having an impact on the thinking and decision making of enterprise leaders. You can see this just by conducting this simple experiment, on yourself:

Go onto Facebook and discover how many of your employees are on it, ones who openly identify themselves as employees by being in network together. At Microsoft, for example, there are tens of thousands of our employees on Facebook.

It is a fair bet that you'll find a decent percentage of your employees out there. This tells you two things worthy of note, no matter what your personal opinion is of social networking sites:

1) Some significant number of your people find value in social networking software, as they freely use it; and

2) Many of your employees are digitally connected externally, with the tools and opportunity to share outside the confines of the firewall.

If you don't have an internal social platform to harness the implications, capitalizing on the good and limitng the risk, things could get interesting quickly, and by interesting we don't mean in a good way, at least not when it comes to information security.

Just like Universal-McCann and Electronic Arts, we'll bet that the Facebook Experiment will be the impetus for a serious and thoughtful approach to introducing social software in your organization. Just as the Internet spawned intranets in the 1990s, consumer social networks will spawn secure, private, business-oriented parallels using the same technologies inside the firewall. SharePoint Server 2007, for example, offers My Sites built-in.

For comments: did you try it? What did you find?

6/11/2009

Gartner's Portals, Content, and Collaboration Conference

We just wrapped our presence at Gartner's 2009 PCC event in Orlando, Florida. PCC is always fairly manic for our team because of the sheer amount of attention SharePoint gets. It's always great, and a little humbling, to see high interest in our product. Gartner ran an extra-fee pre-conference workshop on SharePoint, several analyst or user-moderated panels within the event proper, and SharePoint came up quite a bit in many other sessions.

Our own sponsor session was filled to overflowing. We had about half of the total conference engaged to hear our own Laura Brown on the Millennial Workstyle and what it means for enterprises looking to attract and retain the up and coming generation of talent.

Laura then passed the mike to Bert Sandie of Electronic Arts who shared the systems work they have done to create a social knowledge sharing environment to engage youthful talent (learn more about that here.) Both speakers did a wonderful job and Twitter was buzzing with quick takes from the audience. No hype, no spin, just straight talk.

And then in something of an emerging tradition for us at collaboration events, we arranged a little customer soiree one evening for people to be able to meet with Bert and talk informally at length with one another and us.

We plan to be back at PCC next year and we'll post the details on this site.

6/9/2009

The Word from E3: Wow!

The 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo just wrapped in Los Angeles. It's the big event for the video game industry which is now bigger than the movie industry in the US. It turns out that our colleagues from Microsoft's Home & Entertainment division stole the show with Project Natal.

Since this is a blog about enterprise social software, normally we wouldn't bring up video game technology, even if it is from Microsoft. And the whole idea of virtual worlds, save for some limited applications, isn't what we believe mainstream social computing will be about in the foreseeable future.

Well, at least that's what we thought before we saw Project Natal. The demo is unbelievable and unbelievably real at the same time. Watch it and you'll see what we mean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpC2TXhJGkE

It takes us a little farther afield, but who knows what this kind of interaction could mean for collaboration in the not-too-distant future.

For more on Project Natal for the Xbox 360, read up here.

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