Enterprise social media pioneer NewsGator has acknowledged the multiplicity of platforms in large organisations, with the latest release of its Social Sites 4 solution providing a portal-like ability to merge these into a coherent dashboard of customizable, intelligent activity streams that integrate deeply into organisational business processes and employee workflows

It also includes a new feature known as the Lookout 360 Toolbar to allow the NewsGator social dashboard to remain on-screen and accessible while users are engaged in their everyday business applications.

NewsGator was initially developed to integrate purely with SharePoint, which provides the main home page for many enterprises today, and many have applications specifically written in the Microsoft platform.

"In order to provide better connectivity to users who are not within the SharePoint environment day to day we have introduced the Lookout Extension which can be used with our Toolbar that can be implemented across a SAP portal or Oracle ERP environment for instance or anywhere you like," said Cuneyt Uysal, Director of Business Development – Asia Pacific.

"At NewsGator we have it deployed inside Salesforce.com, and it means that when a user is in a third party system not delivered by SharePoint they can still see at the top of their screen the most recent conversations. I will also receive notifications that tell me if there is something I should read, which is handy for anyone who does not spend a lot of time inside SharePoint for instance  if they are in Payroll or Finance or HR."

Social Sites 4.0 includes new “smart social” tools that intelligently learn from users’ behaviours which key information within social streams they need to match the way they work. For example:

* The Follow a Document feature lets users see and act on changes to important documents via the activity stream rather than having to monitor an entire document library.

* The Top News feature intelligently filters and prioritizes activity stream items to serve up the most important content.

* And the improved Question Routing feature improves the speed and quality of answers to questions posed by users to their communities.

 Social Sites 4 integrates social approvals directly within activity streams. It lets communities of users see and take action collaboratively on important issues and events -- such as a product developer who may want to recommend a feature change, or a team member who may want to work out holiday vacation days in cooperation with his/her peers.

“Social software for business should be more than just another digital ‘water cooler’ for conversations. It should adapt to and enhance the way people work more productively,” said Brian Kellner, NewsGator’s CTO. 

“Social Sites 4.0 intelligently filters out office chatter from high value information, while accelerating common workflow activities with the power of social collaboration.”

NewsGator also unveiled a number of enhancements that enable businesses to improve collaboration and productivity with mobile workers and external partners without compromising the safety of their data to unwanted access - whether it’s in the cloud or within the enterprise. Using a new kind of hybrid cloud model, businesses can take advantage of social in the cloud or mobile environments without having to abandon the strong security of their on-premise SharePoint systems.

Social Sites 4.0 also adds support for Office 365 as an option for external collaboration. A new Social Sites O365 Bridge feature allows Social Sites running on SharePoint 2013 to leverage Office 365 without the complexities of setting up a single sign on between the on-premises SharePoint and Office 365 accounts.

The O365 Bridge allows customers to use Office 365 as an extranet while allowing users to work from internal SharePoint accounts. Users can easily upload files to their Microsoft SkyDrive Pro online storage site and monitor all Social Sites activity stream items from the Office 365 site without having to log in.

NewsGator also unveiled a new solution, with all of the features of Social Sites, but  specifically tailored for those managing  internal communications in large organisations, providing the capacity to schedule and publish messaging based on specific time zones. 

Audiences and individuals can be targeted using any combination of the activity stream, email and mobile push notifications, and the platform provides analytics to track delivery and reaction.

“Communications efforts are a key part of creating an informed, engaged and productive workforce,” said Daniel Kraft, President & CEO of NewsGator. “With Social Sites for Internal Communications we've created a turnkey way to transform that effort; to go beyond the static portal experience and create targeted, highly social and persistent dialogues that inform and engage.”