Organisations using the free version of SharePoint will soon be able to transform their document repository into a productive social computing environment thanks to a new companion application to be launched by NewsGator.

A preview webinar, Make WSS Social, is scheduled for Wednesday, August 18th at 2 p.m. US EDT. This webinar will feature how NewsGator's new application adds profiles, expertise location, and communities to Windows SharePoint Services/SharePoint Foundation.

"WSS makes a great file store and document repository, but many organisations are looking for ways to really unleash that knowledge within their organization," said Eric Sauve, vice president of Tomoye for NewsGator.

"They want to make content searchable and readily available to their talent base who can share it freely across the enterprise - generating an increased level of efficiency and productivity. For years, we've focused on helping organisations using Microsoft SharePoint. Now we're extending social computing capabilities to organisations that are using WSS/SharePoint Foundation, and in a way they can afford."

This NewsGator solution enables WSS users to take advantage of the following key social computing capabilities from within their familiar SharePoint environment:
* Profiles give users a way to add colleagues to their professional network, follow them through activity streams, microblog using rich desktop and mobile clients, and share bookmarks, blogs, wikis, documents, and videos.
* Expert location is a feature that rolls user activity into a global roster of helpful, active, and highly networked users in an enterprise – all of whom are searchable by subject matter domain.
* Communities launched around professional disciplines create centers of excellence for questions and answers, video sharing, blogs, wikis, innovation management, and more.

"Our WSS application will help organizations in two ways," Sauve said. "It will make them social today and, in the process, lay the foundation for a more comprehensive dive into social computing in the future.