SharePoint’s Social Computing Scorecard

Last fall, Mike Watson and I started talking about writing an e-book on the social computing capabilities within SharePoint 2010. While that project continues, and we’re talking with a publisher, we wanted to collaborate for a couple SharePoint Saturday events, and created a presentation that walks through a history of social computing followed by an in-depth review of the major social platforms, comparing them to similar features within SharePoint.

The intent was not to cover every single consumer-based social tool out there, nor was it to outline every single feature – but to focus on the primary features that end users want in an enterprise platform. Our presentation helps business users and IT Pros to understand what it means when someone asks “Can we build a Facebook-like tool for our intranet” or “can you make it drag and drop like Ning?”

While you lose a lot of the detail of the presentation without the narration (plus I pulled out several of the slides, saving the “special sauce” for the e-book), hopefully it gives you an idea of what is out there in consumer-based social computing, and how it compares. Also not-so-obvious was the criteria by which we compared the tools:

• Ease of Entry – Internal
  How easy is it to get others within the firewall plugged in and using the solution?
• Ease of Entry – External
  How easy is it to include external partners and customers?
• Discovery (expertise, interests)
  Is the tool aware when new content is added, or do you have to go through multiple steps to make it aware of something new?
• Contextual Search
  Beyond simple keyword search, is the tool intuitive enough to put my query into content of what I am doing?
• Enterprise Content Management (workflow, business process management)
  Pretty straight forward category.
• Building Communities – External Focus
  How good is the tool at building out communities external to the organization?
• Team Collaboration – Internal Focus
  How good is the tool at building out community within the organization?
• Real-Time Connections
  Does the tool have presence awareness, and can it do anything with that information?
• Cost
  Can I afford it?

I summarize the material with a Gartner magic quadrant graph, and make the point that while SharePoint does not lead every category or feature outlined here, the strength of SharePoint is that it does much, much more than just social computing. With its out-of-the-box collaboration, ECM, security, and search features (among others), SharePoint is the leading platform for enterprise collaboration and productivity solutions (and its also a great business intelligence platform).