Two Microsoft SharePoint solution partners, NewsGator and Colligo Networks, announced they are joining forces to combine social computing, email management and document repository content as a single, integrated body of business knowledge. The partnership combines the SharePoint 2011 collaboration platform, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 social computing suite and Colligo’s solutions for email management in SharePoint, as an integrated solution that extends email content to the social realm and is designed to improve user participation and the quality of data and interactions.
The platform allows emails and attachments to be uploaded to social communities and surfaced and targeted in a user’s activity stream, giving colleagues the opportunity to interact through commenting, liking, sharing or flagging for follow-up. Enterprise search capabilities are designed to streamline collaboration by making it easier to find emails, documents and the social conversations around them. The intellectual property can be tagged and centrally stored, according to a joint release issued by the companies.
“With this partnership, NewsGator and Colligo Networks perfectly complement each other to deliver a comprehensive IT solution that enables customers to connect and communicate with the ease and speed their businesses demand,” said Jenni Flinders, vice president of U.S. partner business for Microsoft. “These two companies, both valued Microsoft partners, represent a best practice within the partner ecosystem: collaboration. Through joining forces, they are broadening and deepening service offerings that are most relevant in today’s market.”
The solution also supports filing from smartphones and tablets, and gives users the option to work in offline mode with community content collections, including idea campaigns, wikis and document libraries, all through Outlook, including sync and version control.
“Colligo has helped organizations worldwide to simplify collaboration and mitigate corporate risk by making content readily accessible through everyday applications such as Microsoft Outlook,” said Barry Jinks, founder and CEO of Colligo Networks. Our partnership with NewsGator provides Colligo customers the ability to further increase the ROI on their SharePoint deployment, with a trusted, enterprise-class option for fully leveraging their SharePoint social network.”
Melissa Risteff, NewsGator senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, said Social Sites, Colligo and SharePoint are about unifying information and streamlining processes. “Bringing the solutions together closes the information gaps and magnifies the benefits of consolidating content,” she said. “We’re proving that there is power in social computing not only as a phenomenon in itself, but as a way to boost the quality of overall business communication and interactions.”