NewsGator CEO & President J.B. Holston is a huge proponent and user of the firm’s social collaboration tools. He spoke with IDM on a recent visit to Australia.

IDM: NewsGator has made a transition from providing corporate RSS in Outlook to Enterprise 2.0. Do you think the email inbox is dead now as the main go-to platform for enterprise?

J.B: I don’t think its dead, but I think it’s on the wane and I think that’s going to increase.  We’ve got a client in France that said, “We’re absolutely going to go no-email.”  At NewsGator we have ‘Social Fridays’ where we tell everyone to turn off their email and they can only interact on the social media. But email’s still got a point, it’s still got a purpose.  It will be used for when it’s got value, which is when you need to draw specific attention to something actionable to a specific group of people one time, and it will be a lot less of the broadcast kind of use that it ended up evolving to. 

IDM: Do organisations want Facebook for the Enterprise, and is that what you’re offering?

J.B. We learnt a lot from what Facebook is doing but in a corporate environment you’re not trying to drive impressions to get advertising, you’re not trying to have popularity contests around strictly social, you’re trying to get work done in a more effective and efficient way.  So there’s a lot of utility for our product and development in looking hard at what Facebook’s doing, but in terms of making the case for this in organisations we rarely hear anyone talk about it as Facebook v Enterprise. 
There’s a higher return on investment the more broadly the social fabric is rolled out, and that’s just the log numbers in networks. The more folks that have access to systems like these the higher the probability that you’re going to get some benefit at the other end when it comes to a horizontal capability like finding the right piece of knowledge with the right expert, etc.  Having said that there’s a lot of work to integrate these into workflow such that it’s adding value to the work process that I’ve got to go through.”

IDM: In the enterprise there are hundreds or possibly thousands of co-workers generating and modifying documents, creating email and making appointments.  How does NewsGator sort through that?

J.B.  We’re tracking all of that interactivity, and using both standard filters and artificial intelligence.  NewsGator  is looking at what you’re consuming and what you’re participating in and what you’re actively contributing to and using mathematical rules essentially to say, “Well that relates to this in the following fashion, therefore this is probably of interest to you as well.”  I think there’s going to be a lot more of that going forward because it’s a big data problem.  I mean fundamentally you’re going to get to the point where you have this massive volume of unstructured interactivity that everybody can’t just follow and hope to find something of value through something like search; it’s just not going to be the way it’s going to get presented. 

IDM: How does NewsGator interact or integrate with social networking with workflow?

JB: By definition we’re able to add social capabilities to anything anyone’s doing with the content, so if you modify a document that fact’s going to be known in the social stream; others can interact directly with whatever work you’re doing around a document.  So the ECM capabilities of something like SharePoint are just part and party of the whole thing from our perspective.  But increasingly I think this is going to be presented to individuals who are doing work in their work context.  Project managers are managing projects, so if they have a community around the project they need a calendar, they need the task list, and they need the Gantt chart if that’s the means by which they’re trying to manage the project.  They want the ability to instantly collaborate with others around any phase that they’re in in that project, so they want that social capability available. 

IDM:  NewsGator provides an out-of-the-box solution to add social media capabilities for SharePoint.  Is it something that people can build themselves if they have a wish to or the resources, and does it require extensive implementation and customisation from developers when you put it in?

JB: Certainly customers can take SharePoint as a platform and build out a bunch of capability.  We don’t find folks are doing that much anymore.  Deloitte is one of our customers; they had 40 folks in India who were building this kind of capability out over about a nine month period when they came across our stuff and just said, “Oh, this is crazy.  Why do we want to, let’s devote those resources to things that are mission-critical and revenue generating for us, not to…” 
So we tend to be bought as a way to achieve those objectives without having to build it, and we’re not finding many folks who still want to go ahead and build, though in theory you could.  In terms of the implementation work, it’s a lot more about, I hate to use the term,  change management:  It’s a lot more about, “Right, how am I going to think about adoption?  How am I going to think about governance?  How am I going to think about community management?  How many communities should I set up initially and how should I pre-populate that with content?” 
There is some UI and UX work that folks tend to want to think about as they deploy these kinds of things because it’s usually part of a broader project, and maybe relaunching my intranet, whatever that may be.  But more of the time we’re finding on the part of our clients is spent on the process of making sure that they do this in a way that users are going to adopt and that the organisation’s culture will support, and that’s much more classic change management kind of work than it is system-integrated or technical work.

IDM:  What’s your take on Microsoft’s Wave 15 update to SharePoint due out by early 2013. Will it still leave plenty of room for NewsGator?

JB: Microsoft continues to innovate in its  platforms, and invests heavily in making those platforms a lot more useful, but 95% of Microsoft’s revenue comes from its ecosystem, so they’re a platform rather than an application company. 
Wave 15 is their next generation and we intend to leverage all that aggressively, just as we did when we went from 2007 to 2010.  There wasn’t a notion of tagging in SharePoint 2007.  Well, they built that into 2010, such that we could just rely on that, rather than having to have that. The wikis in 2010 were pretty good, the blog capability was pretty good.  That wasn’t true of 2007, so things we had to do in 2007 version we didn’t have to do in 2010; similarly the case with 15.  Equally though I’d say it’s not just SharePoint and Wave 15 that they’re investing in that we find really interesting. 
Azure with Office 365 in the Wave 15 context and beyond is going to open up entirely new  SMB size markets that neither Microsoft have focused on tremendously.  That’s all incremental from our point of view.
Also eventually Skype will be integrated via SharePoint to add the ability to have that video connection, that rich video connection on a VoIP basis integrated in all of this.  So the way that we think about Microsoft is they’re constantly innovating platforms, they become ubiquitous across organisations; we think that the world that we serve is one that’s moving so quickly that there’s going to be plenty of room to innovate on top of those platforms. 
But the platforms are going to move beyond just SharePoint in their world; there are going to be a variety of them.