Recommendations for implementing aspects of social networking in SharePoint

Question

We're looking to build a collaborative site for a targeted set of users (~100) based on SharePoint Services and we want to integrate social networking features such as tagging, activity streams and user profiles to encourage them to participate. This is a proof of concept and if it proves to be popular then we might consider using the technology in a new site to replace our existing enterprise portal solution (~2500 users).

We're currently looking at third party solutions such as NewsGator's Social Sites™ Enterprise. What other solutions are out there and how do they compare? What are the drawbacks to NewsGator's or other's solutions?

**Update**

We ended up using NGSS as our solution and while the product is technically sound, it's infrastructure compatibility is falsely exaggerated and their support is lacking professionalism and honesty. Our project deadline was missed and additional unforeseen software licensing and hardware procurement costs were incurred as a result. Our organization has decided that we will not be using them for any future initiatives.

Answer 1

How interesting, we're currently looking at the Newsgator Social Sites product and these are my thoughts on it so far...

Pros

• Developed by smart people e.g. Daniel Larson. You don't have to worry about whether it will be a good quality product.

• Provides a lot of incentive to get people collaborating in an interesting (dare I say fun) way. The Facebook-style wall is a winner in my opinion.

• Backed by Newsgator Enterprise Server, the RSS features are high quality and well tested.

• Appears to have a good API that can be used for custom dev. I think it uses jQuery as its JavaScript library.

Cons

• I worry about the Communities feature. It's a very ad hoc approach to creating SharePoint sites without much structure. We already know that SharePoint can end up a mess without governance and I see this feature promoting that. At the same time it is very powerful and easy to use and the ability to tag documents is great.

• Not sure yet how it can/should be rolled out. The product can do so much that without strong guidance our not-so-technical end users could find it quite baffling. Maintaining the RSS feeds could be quite a job as well.

• Because the product arose out of Newsgator Enterprise Server (NGES) and RSS administration is still done in its user interface, it can confuse administrators. It's hard for some people to know when they should go to NGES and when to use Social Sites.

Don't have much more to add at this stage. I've also looked at Telligent Community Server briefly (not integrated with SharePoint). Looked OK but it hadn't been configured with support for documents so an automatic fail.

Answer 2

I'd be very wary about buying large, 3rd-party, social-networking add-ons to MOSS 2007 unless you know you're going to be stuck with that version of SharePoint for a long time. Social Networking is going to be a huge emphasis in SP 2010, and you can bet that whatever the 3rd party solutions do, by definition they won't be leveraging the features built into the new product.