Company Net – Experts in Microsoft

We at Company Net are currently engaged by one of a number of clients the drinks industry to design a global Corporate Portal for them on SharePoint 2007. After extensive consultation with a wide cross-section of staff over recent weeks, one of the major themes to emerge was the importance of social element of the corporate portal – in particular:

• allowing staff to use the native Wiki functionality of SharePoint 2007, to form a structured Knowledge-base;
• providing blogging functionality to share experience, expertise and good practice; and
• MySite functionality to join up staff across the organisation – allowing them to profile themselves in a way which has never been possible before.

We were blown away by the enthusiasm and vision of the staff consulted.  They were quick to realise the benefits of the SharePoint toolset, and identify areas where they could make use of these to improve communication and information-sharing throughout the business – despite the obvious cultural shift which this brings.

Those cultural considerations are well explored in Richard Dennison’s excellent blog article.  This documents some of the challenges experienced by BT in implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools for BT – and how they overcame them.

Whilst BT did not use SharePoint for its project, there are plenty of good news stories about those who have.  Check out  Social Computing with SharePoint, which sets out the successes of the likes of Electronic Arts and Accenture in their implementations of Enterprise 2.0 functionality using SharePoint 2007.

It’s no surprise that, in October 2009, Gartner placed Microsoft as Visionaries and Leaders in its Magic Quadrant for the ‘Social Computing’ category:

Gartner’s defines the ‘Social Computing’ category as follows:

“We view this market as consisting of products that focus on team collaboration, communities and social interaction. The buyers in this market are looking for persistent virtual environments, in which participants can create, organize and share information, as well as interact with each other.”

Looking ahead to SharePoint 2010, it’s clear that Microsoft are looking to develop the vision further and maintain their position as visionaries.  There’s a great blog article on the “New Social Computing Features” of SharePoint 2010 on Microsoft UK’s SharePoint Team’s blog.  One particular area of focus for SharePoint 2010 has been developing the social potential of the MySite functionality, as well as further enhancing the existing blogging and wiki features.