Microsoft Goes Social with SharePoint 2010

Monday, August 23, 2010 by Brett Pitstick

In a recent webinar on The Enterprise Social Software Market, Gartner Research Analyst Jeffrey Mann featured Microsoft as strong competitor in business social software thanks to the blend of search, social functions, and content management in SharePoint 2010. 

Some of the improvements that SharePoint 2010 features that help further it as a social solution are its:

• User friendly wikis
• Ability to mine Outlook and Exchange for knowledge
• New APIs allow for customization and extended functionality
• Social computing, search, and content management function better together

These improvements have helped to place Microsoft in the leaders quadrant (along with IBM and Jive) of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace.  Gartner also lists Microsoft as the only challenger in the Externally Facing Social Software market, with a stronger ability to execute their software’s vision than any other product in that market-space. 

To see how Sony is using the social features of SharePoint 2010, view this video: